Confronting Complexity: Essays by Edgar Morin

With an Introduction by Alfonso Montuori

Edited by Amy Heath-Carpentier

Advance copy. To cite:

Morin, E. (2018). Confronting Complexity: Essays by Edgar Morin. A. Heath-
Carpentier (Ed.). Manuscript submitted for publication.
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Contents
Confronting Complexity: Essays by Edgar Morin.......................................................................... 1
Contents .......................................................................................................................................... 2
Acknowledgements ....................................................................................................................... 11
Preface........................................................................................................................................... 13
Note ........................................................................................................................................... 14
Foreward by Edgar Morin ............................................................................................................. 16
The Dissolution of Complexity................................................................................................. 17
Blind Intelligence ...................................................................................................................... 19
Introduction—Edgar Morin, an Intellectual Journey .................................................................... 26
Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 28
Edgar Morin at 97: A brief overview ........................................................................................ 33
Beginning with Transdisciplinarity........................................................................................... 37
Autocritique .............................................................................................................................. 40
Stars, Mass Culture, and the Sociology of the Present ............................................................. 44
Opening Up: The Journals ........................................................................................................ 49
Complexity................................................................................................................................ 54
Complex Thought ..................................................................................................................... 66
Notes ......................................................................................................................................... 70
References ................................................................................................................................. 74
Section 1: Complexity: Method .................................................................................................... 84
Chapter 1: A New Way of Thinking ............................................................................................. 85
The Three Theories ................................................................................................................... 86
Self-organization ....................................................................................................................... 87
The Three Principles ................................................................................................................. 89
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 89
Note ........................................................................................................................................... 90
Chapter 2: The Spirit of the Valley1 ............................................................................................. 91
What Absconded from the Paradigm ........................................................................................ 91
The School of Mourning ........................................................................................................... 96
The Impossible Impossible ....................................................................................................... 99
The Non-Method ..................................................................................................................... 100
From Vicious Circle to Virtuous Cycle .................................................................................. 103
The En-cyclo-pedia ................................................................................................................. 106
To Relearn Learning ............................................................................................................... 107
"Caminante no hay camino" ................................................................................................... 109
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The Spiral Inspiration ............................................................................................................. 110

The Spirit of the Valley........................................................................................................... 112
Notes ....................................................................................................................................... 114
References ............................................................................................................................... 115
Chapter 3: Restricted Complexity, General Complexity1 .......................................................... 117
1. 'Classical science' rejected complexity based on three principles. .................................. 117
2. The first breach leading to complexity: irreversibility .................................................... 118
3. Interactions: Order/disorder/organization ........................................................................ 120
4. Chaos................................................................................................................................ 121
5. The emergence of complexity.......................................................................................... 122
6. Generalized complexity ................................................................................................... 124
7. System: "All systems should be viewed as complex” .................................................... 125
8. The emergence of emergence ............................................................................................. 126
9. The complexity of organization .......................................................................................... 127
10. Self-eco-organization ........................................................................................................ 128
11. The relationship between local and global........................................................................ 130
12. Heraclitus: "life from death, death from life" ................................................................... 130
13. Non-trivial machines ......................................................................................................... 132
14. To complexify the notion of chaos ................................................................................... 133
15. The need for contextualization.......................................................................................... 134
16. The hologrammatic and dialogical principles ................................................................... 136
17. Some consequences for the sciences................................................................................. 137
18. Two scientific revolutions introduced complexity ........................................................... 138
19. The introduction of science into history ........................................................................... 139
20. The link between science and philosophy ........................................................................ 141
21. Second epistemological rupture with restricted complexity ........................................ 142
22. The principle of ecology of action ............................................................................... 143
23. Creating "Institutes of fundamental culture" .................................................................... 144
24. I conclude: generalized complexity integrates restricted complexity .......................... 146
25. We should seize the possibilities of metamorphosis .................................................... 147
Notes ....................................................................................................................................... 148
Chapter 4: From the Concept of System to the Paradigm of Complexity1 ................................ 150
Abstract ................................................................................................................................... 150
Introduction: Mastering the Concept of System ..................................................................... 150
The System Paradigm ............................................................................................................. 152
A. The Whole is Not a Catch-All........................................................................................ 152
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B. The Macro-Concept........................................................................................................ 158

C. The Psychophysical Nature of the System Paradigm .................................................... 162
D. The Paradigm of Complexity ......................................................................................... 164
Systemized Theories ............................................................................................................... 166
Conclusions ............................................................................................................................. 167
Notes ....................................................................................................................................... 169
References ............................................................................................................................... 170
Suggestions for Further Reading ............................................................................................ 170
Chapter 5: Complex Thinking for a Complex World: About Reductionism, Disjunction and
Systemism ................................................................................................................................... 172
Note ......................................................................................................................................... 185
Chapter 6: The Concept of System ............................................................................................. 187
1. Beyond holism and reductionism: the relational circuit .................................................. 187
2. The whole is not all .......................................................................................................... 190
Scissions in the whole (the Immersed and the Emergent, the Repressed and the Expressed).
............................................................................................................................................. 190
The Insufficient Whole ....................................................................................................... 191
The Uncertain Whole .......................................................................................................... 191
3. Beyond formalism and realism: from Physis to understanding, from understanding to
Physis; the subject/system and the object/system ................................................................... 193
The Rootedness in Physis ................................................................................................... 194
The System is a Mental Abstraction ................................................................................... 195
Phantom Concept and Pilot Concept .................................................................................. 197
The Subject/Object Transaction .......................................................................................... 198
Observing and Observed System ........................................................................................ 198
References ............................................................................................................................... 201
Chapter 7: On the Definition of Complexity1 ............................................................................ 202
Notes ....................................................................................................................................... 211
Chapter 8: Epistemology – Complexity1 .................................................................................... 212
From the simple to the complex.............................................................................................. 212
What is not simple .............................................................................................................. 212
Less and less simple ............................................................................................................ 213
More and more complicated ............................................................................................... 214
Biological complexity or self-organization ............................................................................ 215
Complexity and the organization of diversity..................................................................... 216
The mysterious automated factory ...................................................................................... 217
The natural automaton-generativity and disorder ............................................................... 218
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 5

'Life from death, death from life' ........................................................................................ 223

A principle of development ................................................................................................ 226
Complexity of complexity .................................................................................................. 229
Levels of complexity............................................................................................................... 230
The many roads leading to complexity ............................................................................... 230
Unequal complexity within one and the same system ........................................................ 232
The problem of hypercomplexity........................................................................................ 233
The logic of complexity. Logical complexity ......................................................................... 235
The challenge to knowledge: uncertainty and ambiguity ................................................... 235
The logic of living things: a generative logic ..................................................................... 238
Dialectical logic .................................................................................................................. 245
Generative logic .................................................................................................................. 247
Arborescent logic. Symphonic logic .................................................................................. 249
Notes ....................................................................................................................................... 250
References ............................................................................................................................... 251
Chapter 9: Organization and Complexity1 ................................................................................. 254
Unitas multiplex ...................................................................................................................... 256
Emergences ............................................................................................................................. 258
The complexity of the notion of organization......................................................................... 262
Basic complexity..................................................................................................................... 265
Notes ....................................................................................................................................... 265
Chapter 10: RE: From Prefix to Paradigm1 ................................................................................ 267
Part I: From the RE of Physics to the RE of Biology ............................................................. 267
Toward a Radical Conceptualization of RE........................................................................ 267
The Meaning of RE in Physics ........................................................................................... 268
RE Takes and Gives Life .................................................................................................... 269
Part II: From Repetition to Recursion ..................................................................................... 273
Part III: Poly-RE ..................................................................................................................... 276
Conclusion: Complex RE ....................................................................................................... 285
Notes ....................................................................................................................................... 287
References ............................................................................................................................... 288
Chapter 11: Beyond Determinism: The Dialogue of Order and Disorder1 ................................ 289
Uncle Thom’s Empty Cabin ................................................................................................... 290
From the Simplicity of Determinism to the Complexity of Order .......................................... 292
On Disorder ............................................................................................................................. 294
The Metaphysical/ontological Opposition and Methodological Problematics ....................... 297
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 6

The Dialogue of Order and Disorder ...................................................................................... 301

Scienza nuova ......................................................................................................................... 302
A knowledge that should know of its own ignorance ............................................................. 307
Notes ....................................................................................................................................... 309
Chapter 12: Social Paradigms of Scientific Knowledge1 ........................................................... 313
Part I. The Sociological Insertion of Describer and Description ............................................ 313
Personal Self-scrutiny ......................................................................................................... 313
From the Analysis of the Analyzer to the Inscription of the Description ........................... 314
The Socio-Cultural Hinterland of Knowledge —from Bacon to Habermas....................... 316
The Sociology of Truth ....................................................................................................... 318
The Necessity and Insufficiency of the Sociology of Knowledge ...................................... 321
The Paradigmatic Gordian Knot ......................................................................................... 327
Translator’s Notes ................................................................................................................... 337
Chapter 13: The Fourth Vision: On the Place of the Observer ................................................... 341
Discussion ............................................................................................................................... 352
Note ......................................................................................................................................... 354
Chapter 14: Self and Autos ......................................................................................................... 355
Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 355
Auto- (Geno-Pheno-) Organization ........................................................................................ 359
Communicational-Computational Auto-organization ............................................................ 360
Being for Self and Auto-centrism ........................................................................................... 362
Note ......................................................................................................................................... 367
References ............................................................................................................................... 367
Chapter 15: Can We Conceive of a Science of Autonomy?1 and 2 ........................................... 369
Conclusions ............................................................................................................................. 379
Notes ....................................................................................................................................... 382
Chapter 16: What Could Be a Mind Able to Conceive a Brain Able to Produce a Mind? ......... 383
The Extraordinary Problem..................................................................................................... 383
The Great Schism .................................................................................................................... 385
Uniduality ............................................................................................................................... 388
The New Monism ................................................................................................................... 391
The Idea of Subject ................................................................................................................. 394
Conclusions ............................................................................................................................. 395
Notes ....................................................................................................................................... 397
References ............................................................................................................................... 398
Chapter 17: The Emergence of Thought ..................................................................................... 399
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 7

The Prehistory of Thought ...................................................................................................... 399

Language and the Emergence of Thought .............................................................................. 403
The Use of Dual Thought ....................................................................................................... 406
The Seculariztion and Individualization of Thought .............................................................. 407
The Modern Adventures of Thought ...................................................................................... 410
Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 412
Note ......................................................................................................................................... 413
References ............................................................................................................................... 414
Chapter 18: For a Crisiology1..................................................................................................... 415
Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 415
The Anti-or-organizational Principle of Organization ............................................................ 416
The Problem of Antagonism ................................................................................................... 421
The Theoretical Complexity of Crises .................................................................................... 422
The Components of the Concept of Crisis .............................................................................. 425
1) The idea of disruption ..................................................................................................... 425
2) The increase of disorder and uncertainty........................................................................ 426
3) Freeze/unfreezing ........................................................................................................... 427
3.1) Development of Positive Feedback ............................................................................. 428
3.2) Transformation of Complementarities in Competitions and Antagonisms ................. 428
3.3) Increase and Appearance of Polemic........................................................................... 429
4) Unfreezing/Refreezing: The Multiplication of Double-Binds........................................ 429
5) The Increase of Research Activities ............................................................................... 429
6) Mythical and Imaginary Solutions ................................................................................. 430
7) The Dialectic of All These Components ........................................................................ 431
Crisis and Transformation....................................................................................................... 432
1) Of Action ........................................................................................................................ 432
2) Change: Progression/Regression .................................................................................... 433
3) Crisis Theory and Evolution Theory .............................................................................. 434
Toward a Crisiology? .............................................................................................................. 435
Notes ....................................................................................................................................... 436
References ............................................................................................................................... 437
Chapter 19: Commandments of Complexity .............................................................................. 438
Section II: Sociology of the Present............................................................................................ 443
Chapter 20: Chronicle of a Film1 ............................................................................................... 444
For a New Cinéma-Vérité ....................................................................................................... 444
Editing ..................................................................................................................................... 473
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 8

Post-Chronique ....................................................................................................................... 483

Notes ....................................................................................................................................... 492
Chapter 21: The Multidimensional Method1 .............................................................................. 497
The Means of Investigation .................................................................................................... 498
Phenomenographic Observation ............................................................................................. 498
The Interview .......................................................................................................................... 500
Groups and Praxis ................................................................................................................... 501
Subjectivity and Objectivity ................................................................................................... 503
The Research Workers ............................................................................................................ 505
Development of the Inquiry .................................................................................................... 506
Notes ....................................................................................................................................... 508
Chapter 22: The Principles of 'Contemporary Sociology' .......................................................... 510
The Phenomenon .................................................................................................................... 510
The Event or Happening ......................................................................................................... 512
Crisis ....................................................................................................................................... 514
Social Temporality .................................................................................................................. 516
Clinical Sociology................................................................................................................... 517
The 'Field of the Present' ......................................................................................................... 518
Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 519
Phenomena .......................................................................................................................... 520
Happenings/Phenomena ...................................................................................................... 520
Crises................................................................................................................................... 520
Research Problems .............................................................................................................. 521
Note ......................................................................................................................................... 521
Section III: Social and Political Reflections ............................................................................... 522
Chapter 23: Hoping Against Hope .............................................................................................. 523
Doubts about Development..................................................................................................... 523
A New Approach .................................................................................................................... 524
Note ......................................................................................................................................... 524
Chapter 24: Our Common Home ................................................................................................ 526
A World in Disarray................................................................................................................ 526
Living Together on Earth ........................................................................................................ 528
Civilizing the Earth ................................................................................................................. 529
A Multidimensional Way of Thinking .................................................................................... 530
Note ......................................................................................................................................... 532
Chapter 25: A Shared Crisis ....................................................................................................... 533
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Note ......................................................................................................................................... 535

Chapter 26: The Anti-Totalitarian Revolution1 .......................................................................... 536
What is Totalitarianism? ......................................................................................................... 536
The Breaking of the Vessels ................................................................................................... 542
A Change of Direction ............................................................................................................ 544
The Revolution........................................................................................................................ 547
The Disintegration of Totalitarianism ..................................................................................... 551
The End of the Soviet System ................................................................................................. 556
Note ......................................................................................................................................... 558
Chapter 27: Realism and Utopia1 ............................................................................................... 560
The Unknowable Real............................................................................................................. 560
The End of the Future and the Return of Mythified Pasts ...................................................... 561
Real-politik and ideal-politik .................................................................................................. 563
Towards Complexity of Thought ............................................................................................ 567
Towards an Anthropolitics ...................................................................................................... 570
Notes ...................................................................................................................................... 574
Chapter 28: Future Ethics and Politics........................................................................................ 577
Ethics Against Politics ............................................................................................................ 577
Political Realism ..................................................................................................................... 578
Towards an Ethics of Humankind........................................................................................... 579
Note ......................................................................................................................................... 581
Chapter 29: The Agents of Double Globalization1 .................................................................... 582
The Agents of Double Globalization ...................................................................................... 584
The Insufficiencies of ‘Economism’ for the Economy ........................................................... 587
To Regulate? To Decelerate? .................................................................................................. 590
A New Approach .................................................................................................................... 592
Prospects and Aims for a Common Home .............................................................................. 593
The Earth in Danger ................................................................................................................ 595
The Die Has Not Been Cast Yet ............................................................................................. 597
Notes ....................................................................................................................................... 597
Chapter 30: European Civilization: Properties and Challenges1 ................................................ 599
From Europa to Europe ........................................................................................................... 599
The Cultural Whirlwind .......................................................................................................... 609
Of Humanity Reconciled, and Happiness on Earth ................................................................ 617
The European Cultural Identity .............................................................................................. 620
Europe and Global Challenges................................................................................................ 626
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Conclusion: A New Crisis of European Civilization? ............................................................ 634

Notes ....................................................................................................................................... 640
References ............................................................................................................................... 640
Chapter 31: Mediterranean Identities.......................................................................................... 642
A Warning............................................................................................................................... 647
Note ......................................................................................................................................... 652
Chapter 32: Ecology: The Uses of Enchantment ........................................................................ 654
Note ......................................................................................................................................... 657
Chapter 33: Demythicising and Remythicising the Mediterranean 1 ......................................... 658
Notes ....................................................................................................................................... 664
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 11

For Matt, Keisha, Adrian, Brett, and Jaap

Acknowledgements
Editing Confronting Complexity has been pilgrimage of sorts, and many accompanied me along

the way. Foremost, I am indebted to Edgar Morin, not just for his collaboration bringing this

volume to fruition, but also for the conceptual framework of transdiscliplinarity through which I

came to interpret my identity as a scholar. En profonde gratitude, Dr. Morin.

My initial encounter with Morin was through my doctoral coursework in Transformative

Studies at the California Institute of Integral Studies. Recognizing my desire to delve both more

broadly and deeply into Morin’s body of work after being introduced to The Spirit of the Valley

and other pieces that were embedded within the program’s design, Alfonso Montuori offered me

the opportunity to edit this volume. I am eternally grateful for his mentorship, enthusiasm, and

trust.

My heartfelt appreciation goes to Heather Scott, a fellow graduate student at the

California Institute of Integral Studies, who provided assistance and comradery in the early days

of the project. Finally, thanks to Sean Esbjorn-Hargens for his patience, editorial suggestions,

and seeing the project come to fruition at SUNY Press.

This volume embodies the gratitude of scholars from across the globe for Edgar Morin’s

immense impact on contemporary social thought. My editorship benefits from their desire to see

more of Morin’s work made available to an English-speaking audience. Particularly among

them, I am indebted to the original translators of the articles contained in this volume: Cohn
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 12

Anderson, Roland Belanger, Frank Coppay, Carlos Gershenson, Sean Kelly, Thierry C.

Pauchant, Frank Poletti, Pierre Saint-Amand, and Alfonso Montuori. Thanks to Liliana Santirso

for her enthusiasm and assistance with making the translations accessible and to Andrew

Carpentier for assisting me in refining the translations of a few difficult passages.

Finally, to my family, especially Michael, Liam, and Muireann, whose enthusiasm for the

complicated amalgamation of roles I inhabit means they sometimes endure my absence, I love

you and thank you for cherishing me as a scholar as well as a partner and mom.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 13

Preface
Encountering the vast reservoir of Edgar Morin’s work can be overwhelming. With a career

spanning decades, including significant contributions that interlace numerous fields, Morin can

intimidate even the most erudite reader, who may well wonder why she has not encountered him

before. Perhaps it is the language barrier. Few Anglophone scholars, particularly in the social

sciences, read French. Therefore, Morin may also be the victim of a phenomenon he so acutely

critiques in the academy: the compartmentalization of knowledge into discrete disciplines with

little interpenetration. Regardless, it is clearly an oversight in the Anglophone world that

diminishes scholarship and practice on many theoretical and foundational issues impacting our

communities and world. Therefore, among those familiar with Morin’s writing, arose a desire for

a collection of his essays in English, and, thus, this book was born.

Almost three years ago, when I first encountered Morin in my Ph.D. program at the

California Institute of Integral Studies, I was unsure of how to approach his impressive body of

work. Even though I had been engaged in interdisciplinary scholarship throughout my bachelors

and masters degrees, Morin’s conceptualization of transdisciplinarity gave foundation and form

to the trail I found myself blazing in my doctoral research.

While the breadth of Morin’s writing made knowing where I begin intimidating, I found

the easiest way to approach his work was through topics that I had some grounding in already.

These are represented in this book in the latter two sections: Sociology of the Present and Social

and Political Reflections. I found Morin’s warmth and humor radiating from the pages.

The audiences for whom Morin authored these essays spanned from the popular to the

academic. In this volume, you will encounter both introductory pieces and highly technical

essays intended for audiences already well versed in the theoretical discourses Morin draws on.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 14

The essays in this book are grouped thematically. I encourage readers to begin with Morin’s

letter to American readers followed by Alfonso Montuori’s Introduction. Knowing something of

the body of Morin’s work and his life enriches one’s experience. Then, jump into a chapter that

catches the eye in the Table of Contents. The experience of reading Morin is akin to gazing upon

a spider’s web. Selecting a node unravels another and suddenly you are immersed in

kaleidoscope that both fractures and focuses your vision of reality.

I know you will find Morin as enduringly poignant and relevant as I have.

Amy Heath-Carpentier

St. Louis, MO

August 2018

Note
When I have built upon original translations of the original works, I have indicated it in the

heading of each chapter. Any endnotes I authored are indicated with my initials: AHC.
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 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 16

Foreword by Edgar Morin

Translation by Alfonso Montuori

Dear American reader,

I have devoted my whole work to exploring human complexity and at the same time to exploring

the notion of complexity itself. Knowledge about humanity is dispersed in all the sciences and

disciplines, including literature and science, and no education, primary, secondary or at the

university level teaches us about our fundamental identity: what it means to be human.

I have devoted myself to this enterprise starting with my first work on what it means to

be human, “L’homme et la mort” (“Humanity and death”), and I have not ceased to pursue the

nature of humanity, notable in Le “Paradigme Perdu” (“Paradigm Lost”) all the way up to

“l’Humanité de l’humanité,” (“The Humanity of Humanity,” Volume 5 of Method).

I naturally couldn’t treat humans as closed systems: human beings also have a biological

nature and depend on a living ecosystem (which in turn depends on the human being), and our

physical nature is constituted by physio-chemical processes. It was therefore necessary to

develop a method to reconnect all the elements of knowledge scattered in a conception of the

human that could not be other than complex, because it had to demonstrate that a human being is

not only spiritual, cultural, social, but also biological and physical.

I was able to elaborate this method during my research on the human. I started with

systems theory, developing it and conceptualizing that any system, no matter what kind, is

complex in its relation to its parts and whole, and in the emergence produced by its organization.

I have drawn on the first uses of the notion of complexity in the work of Ashby, then with Von

Neumann and Von Foerster I found precious signs which provided me with the basis with which
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 17

I could determine the conditions and means of complex knowledge and then complex thought

(thought being what organizes and reflects on knowledge).

On numerous occassions I have been able to use and test my method (which does not

provide a program determined a priori, but an aid for cognitive strategies) in studies and articles

on current events, ranging from the student revolt, which started in California and in 1968 spread

all over the world, to globalization with all its effects on the planet.

There seems to be increasing recognition of the complexity of our physical, biological,

and human universe. But to say, “it’s complex” is to confess the difficulty we have in

describing, in explaining, it is to express one’s confusion in front of an object that has too many

diverse features, too much multiplicity and is too internally indistinct, with too many external

connections.

According to the dictionary, the synonyms of complex include “arduous, difficult,

embarrassing, inextricable, tangled, intertwined, interlaced, indecipherable, obscure, difficult.”

The word complexity refers to the entanglement of the object in question and the speaker’s

embarrassment, because of an inability to determine, clarify, define, and finally an impossibility

of action. The banal usage of the term means “it’s not simple, it’s not clear, it’s not black and

white, we can’t trust appearance, there’s some doubts, we don’t know what’s going on.”

Complexity is a term that so full it’s empty. As it gets used more and more, it becomes more and

more empty.

We are facing a challenge of complexity. This challenge can be found in all knowledge,

whether everyday life, politics, philosophy, and in a particularly pointed way, in scientific

knowledge.

The Dissolution of Complexity

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 18

The inability to recognize, to address, and to think complexity is the result of the dominant

cognitive system in our civilization. This system validates all perception and all description on

the basis of clarity and distinction. It inculcates a form of knowing, originating in the sciences

and technologies of the 19th century, that has expanded to include our social, political, and

human activities. Everywhere it abstracts, meaning that it takes an object out of its context and

out of the whole, rejects the connections and communications with its environment, inserting it

in the compartment of a discipline whose borders arbitrarily break the systemicity (the relation of

the parts to the whole) and multidimensionality of phenomena. It leads to mathematical

abstraction which itself creates a break with the concrete, rejecting all that cannot be calculated

and formalized. It separates and compartmentalizes knowledge, making it increasingly hard to

place them in context. It pushes us to reduce knowledge of complex systems to the elements that

constitute them, and, as Piaget says, “…to consider simple that which appeared to us that way by

its dissociation from the complex.”

In this way, by isolating or fragmenting its objects, this form of knowing tends to

emaciate the world. By reducing our knowledge of wholes to the sum of their parts, it weakens

our ability to reconstitute knowledge. More generally, it atrophies our capacity to connect

(information, facts, knowledge, ideas), in favor only of our capacity to separate. But knowledge

can only be pertinent if it situates its object in its context, preferably in the global system it is a

part of, only if it creates an ongoing process that separates and reconnects, analyses and

synthesizes, abstracts and reinserts in its context.

Without a doubt, all knowledge involves simplification to a greater or lesser degree, in

the sense that it discards as insignificant, contingent, or superficial a certain number of the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 19

aspects of the phenomenon in question. But we are educated for over-simplification, rejecting

everything that doesn’t fit into the scheme of reduction, disjunction, and decontextualization.

Blind Intelligence
Blind intelligence has invaded all technical, political and social sectors.

Economics, the most mathematically advanced social science became the most socially

and humanly underdeveloped when it separated the social, historical, political, ecological, and

psychological conditions from economic activities. Maurice Allais rightly states that “in

economics, everything depends on everything, everything acts on everything.” Von Hayek wrote

that “nobody can be a great economist and be just an economist.” He even adds that an

economist who is just an economist can become harmful and a real danger. That’s why

economists are increasingly unable to make even short-term predictions. Classical economic

science was a discipline created as a closed system. Only a minority of “open” economists from

Perroux to Passet, worked on breaking out of this closed system. Morgenstern shows that the

notion of GNP blindly registers as positive growth system malfunctions, such as increases in

traffic jams, and therefore in fuel consumption, pollution, and health costs.

There is an antinomian connection between the marvels of the works that have emerged

from technical rationality, like great bridges, tunnels, dams, supersonic aircraft, and spaceships,

and the blindness concerning the human, social, and cultural cost of these works. The absence of

contextualization leads to a closed rationality, or rationalization. Abstract and unidimensional

rationalization triumphs on our planet. In Africa so-called rational agriculture has developed

great monocultures with high yields, but it has destroyed subsistence agriculture, a whole

network of social relations, and condemned entire populations to shanty towns or migration.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 20

Engineers planned the Aswan dam with great efficiency to produce electricity and

regulate the flow of the Nile, but the dam also blocked a part of the lemon trees which fertilized

the lower valley and of the fish which nourished the local residents. In this case, as in so many

others, grandiose technological programs conceived in isolation ignored the human, cultural and

social context. My collaborators Claude Fischler and Bernard Paillard, for instance, studied the

development of the Fos complex which was created without awareness of ecological conditions

and economic uncertainties.

In medicine, stunning progress has been made and continues to be made in the

elimination or reduction of epidemics, the growth of vaccines, organ transplants, the prodigious

success of transplant surgery, the first steps of predictive medicine, but medical

hyperspecialization has decidedly noxious effects: organs are treated independently of each

other, and independently of the body as a whole. What cures one organ can in turn often cause

harm to other ones, and, as a result of the same decontextualization, drugs cause what are known

as iatrogenic diseases. The body itself is viewed as a closed system that only benefits from

chemical treatment. The body is split from the mind and spirit which in turn are treated by

psychiatry or psychology largely independently of the body, of the social, cultural, and family

context. The general practitioner can reconnect the organs to the body, the body to the mind, and

the latter to the contexts of family and culture. The G.P. used to play this role in days gone by,

when the patient was known personally as well as psychologically and as the member of a

family, and the doctor could follow all his patients. In today’s cities, the G. P. is not the

conductor who knows the individual parts of all the instruments in the orchestra, but a lower-

level practitioner who directs clients often barely known to specialists and for a variety of tests.

There is undoubtedly a reaction against this sort of approach. We have seen for instance the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 21

emergence of psycho-neuro-immunology, which takes into account not only how physical

conditions affect the mind, but how the mind affects the body, and the rise of group therapy and

family therapy. But we have not yet reached the point of exploring our problems in their full bio-

psycho-social character. We have not created the institutions or the ways of thinking that would

allow us to make these connections.

An intelligence that is fragmented, compartmentalized, mechanistic, disjunctive,

reductionistic, breaks up the complexity of the world into disconnected fragments, splits up

problems, separates what is connected, unidimensionalizes what is multidimensional. It is an

intelligence that is at once short- and far-sighted, colorblind, and monocular. It ends up more

often than not by being blind. It precludes the possibility of understanding and reflection, as well

as any corrective judgment or long-term perspective. The more problems become

multidimensional, the more there is an incapacity to conceive their multidimensionality. The

more problems become planetary, the more they remain unthought. The more the crisis

progresses, the greater our incapacity to conceive of the crisis. Incapable of envisioning the

planetary context and complexity, blind intelligence makes us unconscious and irresponsible. It

believes in the pertinence and the trustworthiness of its planning activities which often ignore the

conditions, the constraints and possibilities, of the context for action.

Consequently, as with natural catastrophes, there are human catastrophes with

innumerable victims and consequences that cannot be accounted for let alone predicted.

Simplifying thought submits to the hegemony of disjunction, reduction, and calculation.

It can only conceive of simple objects that obey general laws. It produces knowledge that is

anonymous, blind to its own context and complexity, ignoring the singular, the concrete,

existence, the subject, affect, suffering, joy, desires, goals, spirit, consciousness. It considers the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 22

cosmos, life, human beings, society as trivial deterministic machines, of which we could predict

every output if we only knew every input. It always chooses as true the simplest answer, by

virtue not of Ockham’s razor, but with a chainsaw that strips away all complexity in principle.

But, as Musil asks in “A Man Without Qualities,” to what extent should the importance of a

psychological fact be proportional to its simplicity?

The application of simplifying thought to human phenomena leads to the crudest ideas.

As Wittgenstein remarked in his “Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough,” “the explanation of the

practices of these (so-called) primitives is much cruder than the practices themselves… Frazer’s

account of the magical and religious notions of men is unsatisfactory: it makes these notions

appear as mistakes.” And in fact, the aberrant simplification of this kind of thinking inevitably

leads to the consideration that all belief, all myth, all doctrine of non-western civilizations is a

web of mistakes and superstitions. It is only in the last decades, with the decline of Europe and

the rich crisis of European rationalization that there is no longer this reduction to error of

anything that does not enter into our simplifying system of intelligibility.

At the same time, disjunctive intelligence is terribly efficient. By throwing complexity

into its trash-cans, and retaining only the quantifiable and algorithmic, by isolating its objects

and subjecting them to its experiments, it allowed and developed manipulation, out of which

emerged its innumerable technical victories, as well as its ignorance of the perverse effects of

those victories.

Simplification becomes directly correlated with manipulation, itself correlated with the

idea, or rather the myth, of the conquest of nature and the mastery of humans over the Universe.

It is what Heidegger called a principle of enframing. As Michel Serres has said, quantification
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 23

leads to mastery, to which we should add, mistaking an abstraction for reality, as well as a

rejection of everything that does not fit into the project of mastery.

There is a “paradigm” of disjunction and reduction, within which there is a principle of

selection/rejection. This paradigm is present yet invisible in the minds of those who have

received its imprint. It demands that we dissolve complexity by bringing it back to its basic

elements, dissolve what cannot be formalized to reduce what is real to its mathematical skeleton.

It requires us to separate object from environment, order from disorder, disciplines within the

sciences, and science from philosophy. The process selects all that is order, quantity, measure.

Rejection eliminates being, existence, the individual, the singular. This paradigm regulates all

forms of knowledge, and it has dominated in scientific, technological, and political knowledge.

Despite the formidable scientific revolutions of the 20th century, and the internal autonomies

which, like an aging Empire, it had to grant certain provinces, multiple but scattered, it survives

hiding underground and dominates the majority of minds.

In fact, the incredible development of the physical sciences and their technical

applications (use of nuclear energy, conquest of space) was tied to an incredible inability to

consider human realities in their complexity, an inability to nurture mutual understanding at the

heart of humanity, to respond to human problems such as war, famine, or poverty. The

development of the physical sciences is connected to the development of the moral under-

development of the techno-scientific spirit. It is in this way that “time is out of joint.” A loose

way of interpreting this Shakespearian formula is to say, this is the age of disjunction, and we

don’t know how to connect.

Science is, nevertheless, complex in its nature, because it involves both consensus about

its values and internal conflict of theories. It walks on four distinct legs that oppose each other in
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 24

a complementary fashion, namely rationalism, empiricism, imagination, and verification. It is

these two dialogics, complex and mutually interfering, that have fostered its formidable progress

including the most recent progress which will undermine and eventually end the domination of

disjunction and reduction. It appears that simplification has beaten complexity, in the same way

that Rome beat Greece, but we know that in the end the Greek spirit was victorious over its

barbaric victor. The science of the 19th century’s march to unite and simplify has run aground: in

its obsessive search for the elementary part and the Universal Law, it has encountered, in its last

advances, and without being able to reabsorb it, the complexity it eliminated in its beginnings.

The method we have elaborated over the process of a long journey is an aid to the

strategy of thinking and not a methodology, or a program to be applied. It contains its own

paradox: whoever thinks along the method of complexity thinks by her or himself, and does

likewise for others.

Method concerns our way of thinking in all domains of knowledge.

It requires a new conceptual foundation, and lead to complex thought.

Complex thought will bear the mark of disorder and disintegration, relativizing order and

disorder, centralize the concept of organization, and develop a profound reorganization of the

principles that determine intelligibility.

Such an enterprise elicits formidable resistance: everywhere minds have been shaped to

eliminate ambiguity, to be satisfied by simple truths, to practice Manichean oppositions of good

against evil, including at the highest levels of academic life. As Tocqueville wrote, “An idea that

is clear and precise even though false will always have greater power in the world than an idea

that is true but complex.”

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 25

Such an enterprise also leads to enormous misunderstandings. Even though in “Method I:

The nature of nature,” insisted on the idea that the treatment of complexity reveals and

emphasizes the uncertainty inherent in all knowledge, and despite the fact that I have indicated

that complex thought holds the awareness of the limited nature of all thought, simplifying minds

attribute to it the characteristics of a Hegelian total system. Complex thought cannot, nor does it

want to a universal system of intelligibility because it has to be dialogical, open, and contain

incertitude at its core, utilizing the notion of system to understand organization.

There are also poor conceptions of complexity that rest on the very same principles they

wished to leave behind. Certain researchers of complex systems are in search of the “laws of

complexity,” ignoring that the notion of law holds only for a simplified universe… As Hayek

states, “the search for Laws is not a marker of scientific procedure, but only a characteristic

proper to theories concerning simple phenomena.”

The issue, therefore, is not to search for laws or a new system, but to integrate a method

that would allow for complex knowing.

The reform of method cannot be separated from a reform in thought, which in turn cannot

be separated from a reform in education.

Edgar Morin

Paris 2016
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 26

Introduction—Edgar Morin, an Intellectual Journey

It is not certainty or assurance but need that has driven me to undertake this work, day after day,

for years. I have felt myself possessed, by the same evident necessity of trans-substantiation as

that by which the spider secretes its thread and weaves its web. I have felt myself plugged into

the planetary patrimony, animated by the religion of that which bonds, the rejection of that which

rejects, and infinite solidarity; what the Tao calls the Spirit of the Valley which "receives all the

waters that flow into it.” Morin, this volume, p.xxx

Every human being, even the most anonymous, is a veritable cosmos. Not only because the

swarm of interactions in her brain is larger than all the interactions among stellar bodies in the

cosmos, but also because she harbours within herself a fabulous and unknown world. Morin

(2008: 93)

The reform in thinking is a key anthropological and historical problem. This implies a mental

revolution of considerably greater proportions than the Copernican revolution. Never before in

the history of humanity have the responsibilities of thinking weighed so crushingly on us. (Morin

& Kern, 1999, p. 132)

We need a kind of thinking that relinks that which is disjointed and compartmentalized, that

respects diversity as it recognizes unity, and that tries to discern interdependencies. We need a
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 27

radical thinking (which gets to the root of problems), a multidimensional thinking, and an

organizational or systemic thinking. (Morin & Kern, 1999, p. 130)

…our thinking is ruled by a profound and hidden paradigm without our being aware of it. We

believe we see what is real; but we see in reality only what this paradigm allows us to see, and

we obscure what it requires us not to see.” Morin (2008: 86)

The course of the human adventure is unpredictable: this should incite us to prepare our minds to

expect the unexpected and confront it. Every person who takes on educational responsibilities

must be ready to go to the forward posts of uncertainty of our times. (Morin, 2001, p. 3)

We should learn to navigate on a sea of uncertainties, sailing in and around islands of certainty.

(Morin, 2001, p. 3)

I know more and more that the only worthwhile knowledge is that which feeds on uncertainty

and that the only living thought is that which maintains itself at the temperature of its own

destruction. Morin, this volume, p.xxx

The word method may have several meanings. First of all, there is the Cartesian meaning of

method as “rightly conducting reason and seeking truth in the sciences.” It is precisely this

meaning of the word method that I subscribe to, and extend further: to rightly use our reason not
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 28

only in the sciences but in all matters concerning knowledge, including knowledge of

knowledge, and in all matters concerning our relations with the outside world, with life, with

society, with ourselves. (Morin, 1990) pp. 256-57, translation by AM)

Introduction
Edgar Morin is a thinker for our times. In a rapidly changing, interconnected world, full of

uncertainty, facing what he has called “a crisis of the future,” Morin’s work helps us confront the

complexity of the challenges before us. How can we make sense of this new world, in the throes

of a transformation that seems to hover perilously close to the abyss? Morin is fond of quoting

Ortega y Gasset: No sabemos lo que nos pasa y eso es precisamente lo que nos pasa. We don’t

know what’s happening to us, and that is exactly what’s happening. And yet wherever we turn

we see the return of fundamentalisms, absolutisms, and the search for certainty. The level of

public discourse has become so profoundly disturbing precisely because in this cauldron of

change, punctuated by the horrors of terrorism, bombings, wars, poverty, injustice, and

hopelessness, so many voices seem to speak with absolute certainty and such unwillingness to

listen to other perspectives. It is so tempting to fall back on simple solutions, on scapegoating, on

the certainty of solutions whether technological or political. It is so easy to ignore the complexity

of our situation and reduce multidimensional, systemic problems to one single answer. And it’s

so frightening to admit we don’t know what’s going on. Simplification abstracts and isolates, and

therefore it hides the relational nature of any system, its relations with the environment, with

other systems, with time, with the inquirer (Morin, 1981). And these are precisely the

connections we need to make.

Stephen Toulmin’s book Cosmopolis explores the vision that emerged in 17th century

Europe and was so central to the next 300 years (Toulmin, 1992). This vision led to great
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 29

scientific advances and tremendous changes, but it was also deeply flawed. It was a vision of

what Toulmin called Cosmopolis. It emerged after a prolonged period of war and chaos in

Europe. In an effort to confront this disorder, it was a vision in which Descartes reigned in a

world where context was eliminated, a world that saw, as Toulmin put it, a shift from the

particular to the universal, the local to the general, the timely to the timeless, and an obsession

with order and certainty. What if we had been guided by Montaigne rather than Descartes,

Toulmin asks? Morin begins the first volume of Method by situating his quest for method—

because it is a quest, he is not handing us a ready-made method--in the context of our solar

system and the sun, and he right away establishes what will be a key neologism that captures an

essential dimension of his work and thought: Chaosmos. Not the well-ordered Cosmos of 17th

century Europe, the Newtonian order of the well-oiled Machine, a world where King Order

reigns. But also not the decaying or chaotic or completely disordered universe. Hence Chaosmos,

the dialogue between order and disorder. Here we find already the complexity of Morin’s vision,

and a warning that we’re not dealing with something that’s finished, but an ongoing process. The

subtitle of the first section of Method is called Order, Disorder, Organization, and Morin

reminds us in the sub-section entitled The New World: Chaosmos, Chaos, Cosmos, Physis, that if

classical science didn’t know what to do with chaos, and therefore rejected it, in the new world

chaos is dynamic and what he calls “genesic,” a neologism which we might also translate as

generative. Cosmogenesis happens in and through a dialogue between chaos and order.

Chaosmos reflects an understanding of the world that recognizes the interplay of order

and disorder, in the complexity of their relationship. It reflects the need to develop a way to

make sense of a world that is not completely orderly. It invites us to use a way of knowing, a

method that does not start with the fundamental premise of order, viewing all disorder as
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 30

epiphenomenal, or something to be rejected in favor of pristine order. The world of Cosmopolis

was driven by order and simplification, chasing out complexity and disorder. Today more than

ever we need a way to approach the complexity of life and world, so radically interconnected,

surprising, uncertain, emergent, and unwilling to be boxed in and ordered around.

Morin (Morin, 2004b) warns that

(T)he mind must remain ever vigilant in its permanent struggle against simplification.

The risks of simplification are amplified in periods of collective hysteria, of crisis and

war. We find ourselves in such a period, and therefore there is an increased need for both

complex thinking and a complex ethics. (p. 223)

What is needed is not simplification, but an ability to address the great complexity of our

condition. Morin shows we are still approaching the world from the perspective of what he calls

the paradigm of simplicity. Because it is disjunctive and reductive, this dominant paradigm

cannot account for interdependencies, for systemic phenomena, for disorder, for uncertainty and

for the multidimensional nature of the problems facing us which reflect the realities of life and of

human beings themselves.

Intelligence that is fragmented, compartmentalized, mechanistic, disjunctive, and

reductionistic breaks the complexity of the world into disjointed pieces, splits up

problems, separates that which is linked together, and renders unidimensional the

multidimensional…The more problems are multidimensional, the less chance there is to

grasp the crisis. The more problems become planetary, the more unthinkable they

become. Incapable of seeing the planetary context in all its complexity, blind intelligence

fosters unconsciousness and irresponsibility. It has become the bearer of death. (Morin &

Kern, 1999, p. 1)
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 31

The paradigm of simplicity puts order in the universe and chases out disorder. Order is

reduced to one law, one principle. Simplicity can see either the one or the many, but it

can’t see that the One is perhaps at the same time Many. The principle of simplicity

either separates that which is linked (disjunction), or unifies that which is diverse

(reduction) (2008, p. 39).

Morin’s call is beginning to be heeded, as we shall see. As an example, noted

organization and leadership theorist Haridimos Tsoukas has critiqued scientific rationality in

management thinking, convincingly arguing that the world described in the literature and the

theories it develops do not reflect the complexity of lived organizational experience (Tsoukas,

2017). What is needed according to Tsoukas is theory that complexifies rather than simplifies.

Arguing for complex thought, he writes that

(I)f the paradigm of simplification relies on disjunction and reduction, the paradigm of

complexity relies on distinction and conjunction – ‘to distinguish without disjoining, to

associate without identifying or reducing’ (Morin, 2008, p. 6). Complex thinking seeks to

account for experience in a unified manner and, accordingly, conjoin concepts by

overcoming disciplinary isolation. Complex thinking, however, does not lead to know-it

all thinking. To take complexity seriously means that one realizes the irreducible

ambiguity and uncertainty of the world, which present inquirers with the ongoing need to

complexify their thinking. (p.143)

Morin’s Complex Thought is far from being a hyper-rational, ultra-scientific panacea.

For Morin (Morin, 2008c), knowing and thinking are not about reaching an absolute, certain
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 32

truth, but about a dialogue with uncertainty, because “we are condemned to uncertain thought, a

thought riddled with holes, a thought that has no foundation of absolute certainty" (p.46).

Furthermore, Complex Thought does not seek to purify itself of “subjectivity” and affect

(Morin, 2004b):

We now know that every rational act of the mind is accompanied by affect. Though it can

immobilize reason, only affect is capable of mobilizing it. (p.152)

Reason and passion can and should correct each other. We can simultaneously reason

with our passions and impassion our reason. (p.153)

In this way the idea of wisdom is complexified: it is not a question of eliminating affect,

but rather of integrating it. We know that passion can blind us, but also that it can

illuminate reason if the latter is allowed to illuminate it in return. (p.152)

And here we find one of the goals of Complex Thought. “Where is the wisdom we lost in

knowledge, where is the knowledge we lost in information,” asked T.S. Eliot. Rather than

presenting us with solutions, in his effort to articulate Complex Thought and the beginnings of a

Method, Morin is inviting us to cultivate the wisdom that is so necessary to confront the

challenges we are facing. Accumulation of more knowledge is not enough. If the scientific

revolution brought us an explosion of new and almost miraculous knowledge, what is needed

now is a thorough reflection on our relationship with knowledge, on the knowledge of

knowledge, and on the knower. Confronted with a plurality of perspectives on issues, Morin

stresses the need to engage these different views, all the while reflecting on our own view. As the

noted Italian family therapist Mara Selvini Palazzoli writes (Selvini Palazzoli, 1990):
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 33

Since, in the relationship between observing and observed system, the observer is

as much part of the observed system as the observed system is part of the intellect

and culture of the observing system, Morin finds that the observer observes

himself while he observes the system. (p. 128)

Morin offers us an approach to knowledge—and to life—that recognizes complexity and

uncertainty, and views them not as enemies to be eliminated but as realities to be engaged, as

well as sources of creativity and change. There is no deterministic vision of the future, no certain

path laid out for us, but rather a path laid out in walking, a path to be created together.

Edgar Morin at 97: A brief overview

The creative intellect is that which is ready to abandon classifications known from

the past and to acknowledge in its strongest form the proposition that life,

including one’s individual life, is pregnant with unheard of possibilities and may

be the vehicle for transformations without precedent. When such a possibility is

accepted, the coercive power of all known systems of classification and the

predictive value of regularities based on a history of repetitions are set aside in

favor of an openness to the forces of life that are pressing for novel expression

both in one’s individual existence and through it as a vehicle for the creation of an

unforeseeable future. (Barron, 1995, p. 63)

Creative individuals are those who have learned to prefer irregularities and apparent

disorder and to trust themselves to make a new order, simply because in their own

experience they have been confronted with interpersonal situations that made prediction

on the basis of repetition extremely difficult, but which by dint of effort and through the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 34

grace of unusual aptitude for accurate perception proved finally resolvable. (Barron,

1995, p.64)

Edgar Morin was born in Paris in 1921. A profoundly Mediterranean yet thoroughly planetary

thinker with no fixed disciplinary abode, Morin’s contributions span a number of fields and

cover a dizzying number of topics. His contributions are to be found in such diverse fields as

sociology, media studies, visual anthropology, philosophy, action research, politics, systems

theory, ecology, aesthetics, and education. Recently, and with increasing frequency, his

contribution is being felt in the natural sciences, particularly in biology and the development of

systems biology, but also in other fields (Auffray, Imbeaud, Roux-Rouquié, & Hood, 2003;

Malaina, 2015; Roux-Rouquié, 2000, 2002). Because of this unusual diversity of interests in an

age of hyper-specialization, Morin cannot be easily categorized. He can also, as a result, easily

be misunderstood and trivialized, a fate that is all too common for inter- and trans-disciplinary

scholars1 (Maruyama, 2004).

I have chosen to provide a contextual introduction to Edgar Morin’s work through an

outline of his intellectual trajectory in the form of a “biblio-biography.” A review of Morin’s

journey helps us, I believe, to better understand the man and his mission. This contextualization

itself requires some context. Morin’s work, was, until quite recently, not very well known at all

in the English-speaking world. This can give the impression to English-speakers that he is

therefore also not well-known in his own country, since the assumption is often that whatever is

significant must be translated for English-language consumption. In fact, Morin is quite a

celebrity in France and very well known in Latin countries (and in other parts of the world, as we

shall see) where he is viewed as one of the major thinkers our time. In his home country of

France, he has been recognized with the very high honor of Grand Officier de la Legion
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 35

D’Honneur. The prestigious newspaper Le Monde devoted a special stand-alone supplement to

his work, and he is arguably one of the few remaining public intellectuals, regularly appearing on

television and other media to address important current events. He is consistently featured on the

cover of magazines, including a special issue of the magazine Sciences Humaines devoted to

entirely to his work.

The 21st century has seen the emergence of several institutions devoted to Morin’s

thought, such as the Edgar Morin center for the study of complexity at the University of Messina

in Sicily, the Multiversidad Mundo Real Edgar Morin, a university in Mexico based on the

principles of Morin’s work, a research center at Ricardo Palma University in Lima, Peru, and the

renaming of the CETSAH, or Centre d’Études Transdisciplinaires, Sociologie, Anthropologie,

Histoire, at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the prestigious French

National Research Center, as the Centre Edgar Morin.

As of this writing, Morin’s work has been translated in 28 languages in 42 countries. He

has been most influential in Southern Europe, Latin America, and French-speaking Africa, as

well as more recently in China and Japan. Numerous books have been written about him in

France, Spain, Italy, Canada, and England, as well as in Latin America and French-speaking

Africa (Anselmo, 2005, 2006; Banywesize, 2007; Bianchi, 2001; Celeste, 2009; Ciurana, 1997;

De Siena, 2001; Fages, 1980; Fortin, 2002, 2008; Gembillo, 2008b; Gembillo & Anselmo, 2013;

Kakangu, 2007; Kofman, 1996; Sergio Manghi, 2009). He was recently the subject of a second

major biography (Lemieux, 2009) as well as a documentary about his life on French national

television by Jeanne Mascolo (Edgar Morin, a planetary thinker) and several other

documentaries including one on his work on cinema. An Emeritus Director of Research at the

CNRS, Morin has received honorary doctorates (appropriately in subjects ranging from political
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 36

science to psychology to sociology) from universities including Messina, Geneva, Milan,

Bergamo, Thessaloniki, La Paz, Odense, Perugia, Cosenza, Palermo, Nuevo Leon, Université de

Laval à Québec, Brussels, Barcelona, Guadalajara, Valencia, Vera Cruz, Santiago, the Catholic

University of Porto Alegre, the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte, Candido Mendes

University (Rio De Janeiro), and he holds an itinerant UNESCO chair in Complex Thought. Now

in his mid- nineties, Morin is without a doubt more broadly accepted than ever before, and

indeed viewed in many ways as prescient in the topics he has addressed and their relevance for

contemporary times.2

Morin’s books address a rich variety of topics, in such a wide range of disciplines, that

even in this biblio-biographical introduction I will have to discuss only a selection of the 60 or so

books he has published, in order to give an idea of the scope of his work. Over the years Morin

has categorized his work in different ways. In the boxed set of Method, published in 2008, we

find the following categorization: Method, which comprises the six volumes of Method and

comes in at approximately 2,500 pages, with the first volume, The Nature of Nature, published in

1977 and the final volume, Ethics, published in 2004; Complexus covers numerous more

theoretical works on complexity focusing on systems theory, cybernetics, information theory,

sociology and the philosophy of science; Pedagogy addresses Morin’s work on education,

inspired by requests from both the French government and UNESCO; Fundamental

Anthropology covers his work on death, cinema, and Le Paradigme Perdu (Morin, 1979), which

was a precursor to Method, an effort to explore how human nature integrates with science and

the humanities, as well as the three volumes on the “unity of man,” organized with Italian

cognitive scientist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini (Morin & Piattelli Palmarini, 1978); Our Times

explores current events over a period of 50 years, including ecology, popular culture, including
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 37

cinema and the Hollywood star system, the contested nature and history of Europe, the Soviet

Union, the student revolts of 1968, his reflections on the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, and the

experience of Jews in Europe; Politics, with both his early effort to articulate the relationship

between human nature and politics and his later work on creating a “politics of civilization,” a

term that was picked up by President Sarkozy in a way that Morin immediately and publicly

declared illegitimate; Lived Experience consists of eight volumes of journals and first-person

accounts and reflections, starting in the 1950s and covering among other things his experience in

California in the late 1960s (Morin, 2008a), the fall of the USSR, a trip to China, and the death

of his wife, Edwige (Morin, 2009a); Transcriptions of Talks concludes with several interviews

and assorted presentations. In the process of reviewing some of these volumes, we can begin to

see Morin’s “path laid down in walking,” and begin to recognize the threads that tie much of his

work together.3

Beginning with Transdisciplinarity

Edgar Morin’s first book was L’An Zero de l’Allemagne [Germany Year Zero]. Written right

after the end of World War II when Morin, then in his mid-twenties, was in Germany with the

French Army. Germany Year Zero was his effort to document the devastation of one of Europe’s

most sophisticated and cultured countries, the home of Goethe, Beethoven, Kant, and other

towering figures of Western civilization. It was an attempt to understand how such a country

could have been overtaken by the horror of the Nazi era. Central to the book is Morin’s

unwillingness to reduce Germany and Germans to “sales boches” (filthy Germans), and to assess

the horror of the situation in a broad context and with an unusual depth of feeling. Here we

already find a cornerstone of what Morin, the Jewish resistance fighter who lived in mortal

danger during the war years, would later call Complex Thought, a refusal to reduce and thereby

mutilate. Complex Thought, as Morin was later to articulate it, seeks avoid the problems of
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 38

reduction, disjunction and polarization. Morin did not want to reduce Germany and its people to

the actions of the Nazis, which in the immediate aftermath of the war was all too easily done.

This refusal to reduce, and to take a Manichean, simplistic view (views that are driven by fear,

anger, and other emotions, but often masquerade as coldly rational) is a central element of

Morin’s thought.

The term reductionism is used with great, perhaps excessive, frequency these days. For

Morin, the source of his concern about reductionism emerges not only from his scientific inquiry,

but is embedded in the existential reality of daily life. It manifests in the unwillingness to be a

reductionist in his view of human beings, and in the ethical stance of not reducing anybody to

their worst characteristic or action.

Morin’s next work, published in 1951, was L’Homme et la Mort [Humanity and Death]

(Morin, 1970a). Here we find, in typically Morinian fashion, a sustained meditation on death that

is deeply personal as well as planetary (drawing extensively, for example, on the world’s

customs and religions), both holographic and multidimensional, to use terms Morin would later

employ. Personal, because Morin lost his mother at an early age, an event affected him

profoundly. The loss of his mother haunts Morin’s work in too many ways to address in this brief

sketch.4 Morin’s work is planetary in scope because he explores death cross-culturally in the

great religions and spiritual traditions, throughout human history, anthropologically,

sociologically, psychologically, and in the natural sciences, finding that the plurality of

interpretive frameworks shed light, each in a different way, on this most profound event. Morin’s

work has always had a holographic, multidimensional quality: the part and the whole are always

interconnected, and one finds the part in the whole and the whole in the part. The subject is

approached from a variety of dimensions, from the biological to the cultural to the psychological
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 39

and mythological, each illuminating it in different ways.

Morin’s book on death brings together two themes that recur throughout his work. The

motivation for inquiry emerges from personal experience, most dramatically of course with the

death of his mother, certainly not through abstract speculation or disciplinary agendas. Another

key element in this work is transdisciplinarity. Morin’s inquiry is never limited by disciplinary

boundaries. It draws on a whole range of what he was later to call pertinent knowledge (Morin,

2001b). In other words, he is not driven by problem solving in the context of the agenda of a

specific discipline.5 Rather, he is motivated by his own experience, in this case his loss, and

more specifically by the need to make sense of lived experience, his own and that of every other

human being inevitably facing loss, and by the complexity of the topic he is addressing. The

research is led by the demands of the topic itself, and moves across disciplines to draw on

knowledge that is pertinent as it emerges from the inquiry, not guided (and limited) by

disciplinary boundaries. This is central to what makes Morin’s vision of transdisciplinarity so

important and so timely: it is not an attempt to create abstract, totalizing, theoretical frameworks,

or to further the agenda of a discipline. It is grounded in the need to find knowledge that is

pertinent for the human quest to understand and make sense of lived experience, and of the “big

questions” which are increasingly left out of academic discourse, precisely because they are too

complex and inevitably span a variety of disciplines. Lived experience, in this view, simply

cannot satisfactorily be reduced to the perspective of one discipline.

Morin’s transdisciplinary approach crosses and integrates a plurality of disciplines. A key

dimension of transdisciplinarity is understanding the way that knowledge is constructed in

various disciplines and approaches (Montuori, 2005a). Morin’s work is radical in this sense

because it traces the roots of knowledge, digging deep to find the underlying assumptions that
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 40

form the foundations for the differing perspectives. His transdisciplinarity explicitly surfaces the

assumptions of the many different disciplines it addresses. While not demanding the complete in-

depth specialization a discipline-based researcher might have, transdisciplinary research does

demand a more philosophical or meta-paradigmatic position that steps back to observe how

different paradigms shape the construction of knowledge, exploring the roots of the disciplines.

The point is to become aware of one’s own assumptions about the process of inquiry, as well as

uncovering the assumptions of the various perspectives that inform inquiry, and draw on

specialized knowledge wisely.

Morin’s approach has always been both planetary and personal. We later find wonderful

examples of this “holographic” method in his account of his experience at the Salk Institute in

late 1960s California, available in English as California Journal (Morin, 2008a), as is Vidal and

His Family (Morin, 2009b), which is at once a biography of Morin’s father, whose name was

Vidal, a history of his family, of Sephardic Jews, and of Europe, interweaving personal letters

and macro-history, family anecdotes, and the larger culture, also available in English. The

political, cultural, and religious context of Jewish migrations provide the reader with a rich

picture of the 20th century. In Pour Sortir du Ventieme Siecle [Leaving the 20th Century Behind]

(Morin, 2004b), Morin addresses key political issues through a combination of theoretical and

historical reflection on the state of the world grounded with extensive examples and reflections

from his own experience.

Autocritique
Morin’s early work on death shows his willingness to grapple with profound existential issues so

often obliterated in the frequently all too sterile and fragmented discourse of social science and
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 41

philosophy. Morin’s work does not come from an attempt to escape life for an ivory tower, or to

control it through intricate theoretical frameworks and maps, but from an effort to immerse

himself in it more deeply, to provide the sciences with ways to account more adequately for the

lived complexity of life, and indeed to assist the reader in that process of immersion. Morin

characterizes his later work on complex thought as an attempt to develop a method that does not

“mutilate,” that does not fragment and abstract, that does not do violence to life, that is not

unidimensional, anemic, antiseptic, homogenized, pars pro toto. This transdisciplinary approach

could already be seen emerging in the journal Arguments that Morin led along with Roland

Barthes, Kostas Axelos, and others from 1956 to 1962. The unusually broad range of topics

addressed in the journal reflected a focus on issues rather than disciplinary agendas, and a

willingness to range far and wide.

After the Second World War, the influence of the Left and of the Communist party in

European thought was enormous. There were very clear boundaries with which to assess what

was considered to be outside the party line. Morin’s independent thought was clearly too open

and increasingly heretical. In Autocritique (Morin, 2004a), published in 1959, Morin documents

his expulsion from the party in 1951 for writing an “inappropriate” critical article. Morin’s

Autocritique is a remarkable document from an “engaged” intellectual grappling with the

complexities of political life. An exercise in honesty and self-reflection, it provides us with rare

visibility into the life and thought of a man in the thick of the events that were shaping European

and indeed planetary culture at that time, such as Stalin’s rise to power and the repression in the

Eastern block countries. Drake (2002) writes that Morin was “one of the few PCF (French

Communist Party) intellectuals who refused to blindly follow the Party line” (p. 70). Exploring

such phenomena as self-deception, cognitive dissonance, groupthink, and closed-minded

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 42

thinking and behavior in himself and in “the party,” we find another theme that was to run

through all of Morin’s future work. In his 7 Complex Lessons in Education for the Future

(Morin, 2001), a document he wrote at the request of UNESCO, the first lesson is about self-

deception and combating “error and illusion.” How is it that we let ourselves literally become

possessed by ideas, by the party, by our “faith,” by our “cause,” even by what we believe to be

“science?”

Autocritique marks an important turning point for Morin. While we normally assume that

we have ideas, it became clear to Morin that ideas can also have us—literally possess us. Human

beings can be possessed by ideologies and belief systems, whether on the Left or the Right,

whether in science or religion. Henceforth, Morin’s effort would be to develop a form of

thinking—and of being in the world—that is always self-reflective and self-critical, always open

and creative, always eager to challenge the fundamental assumptions underlying a system of

thought, and always alert for the ways in which, covertly or overtly, our thinking has an hard

core that cannot be questioned or challenged. Knowledge always also requires the knowledge of

knowledge, the ongoing investigation and interrogation of how we construct knowledge. And

indeed, Knowledge of Knowledge is the title of the third volume of Morin’s Method (Morin,

1986).

The participation of the observer in every observation, the role of self-reflection and self-

inquiry in inquiry, the dangers of reduction and disjunction, and the often hidden motives of the

quest for certainty will be central and recurring themes in all of Morin’s epistemology of

complexity.

The epistemological position integrating the inquirer in every inquiry is central to

Morin’s work. It can be found in his philosophy of science and it is a cornerstone for his ethics,
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 43

developed in the sixth and final volume of Method. For Morin this means constant vigilance,

self-examination, self-criticism, what he refers to as an ongoing effort of “psychic culture,” in

order to avoid phenomena such as self-deception, projection, and groupthink. Morin’s

experiences with the Communist party sensitized him to the many ways human beings can

become victims of errors and illusions, “wanting to believe,” and above all, perhaps, driven by

an illusion of certainty and a desire to categorize and bring order to a complex, uncertain world.

For Morin, Homo Sapiens Sapiens is really Homo Sapiens Demens, and there is a rich

complexity in this “uniduality.” Homo is clearly not only sapiens, or wise, let alone doubly wise.

Homo is also demens, or irrational, prone to wild excess, feverish imagination, and unconstrained

passion and emotion. But demens should not be viewed as exclusively “diabolic,” but rather as

also contributing in a dialogic fashion to our imagination and inspiration, manifesting in great art

and the development of new perspectives as well as in desperate hallucinations. Above all, we

see here an ongoing cybernetic process of navigation and calibration between Sapiens and

Demens, rather than a static black and white choice between the unequivocally good and bad.

The imagination and the imaginary play a central part in Morin’s understanding of the human, as

we shall see.

While rejecting the Communist party, Morin acknowledges the importance of Hegel and

Marx in his thinking in a delightful volume called Mes Philosophes, or My Philosophers (Morin,

2011b). Concepts such as the dialectic, totality, “generic man,” and praxis were all to find their

way into Morin’s work but transformed—complexified. They provided the initial impetus for

reflection and transformation: The dialectic, for instance, was in Morin’s work transformed into

the dialogic, which did not lead to an inevitable synthesis, and the concept of totality—such a

vital one to engage for someone with Morin’s omnivorous tendencies--was made to dialogue
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 44

with Adorno’s statement that totality is untruth.

Stars, Mass Culture, and the Sociology of the Present

At the same time that Morin was writing about death and engaging in a very public political

“self-critique” of his participation in the Communist party, and the way that this applied

holographically to the larger issues of the role of ideologies and totalitarianism in the context of a

larger planetary culture, he was also beginning to write a series of books on what might be

initially thought of as “lighter fare.” In the mid- to late 1950s and early 1960s, Morin wrote

groundbreaking works about cinema, the Hollywood star system, and popular culture.6 Morin’s

innovative work in this area has been recognized as crucially important—both prescient and still

vitally relevant in a discussion that has often drowned in vapid and sensationalist scholarship as

well as thuggish Marxism. Lorraine Mortimer pointedly reminds us of how sociologist Pierre

Bourdieu attacked Morin’s study of mass culture because it was “an instrument of alienation at

the service of capitalism to divert the proletariat from its revolutionary mission” (Mortimer,

2001, p. 78). As Lorraine Mortimer writes in the introduction to Cinema, or the Imaginary Man

(Morin, 2005b), Morin’s book was a breath of fresh air in 1959, when much of the discourse on

cinema was highly critical of “bourgeois’ entertainment, viewing it as opium for the masses that

promoted capitalist values.

Writing in the late 1950s in Stars, Morin (2005a) was arguing the at the time completely

countercultural idea that the cult of celebrity has a strong religious component. Research

conducted 50 years later in the United Kingdom and the United States suggests celebrity worship

can indeed play a role similar to that of religion and is the source of new “myths” and mythical

figures in today’s society (Giles, 2000; Maltby, Day, McCutcheon, Houran, & Ashe, 2006).

Morin was one of the first academics to take popular culture seriously. His
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 45

psychoanalytically influenced discussion of interiority, subjectivity, dreams, myth, his use of the

concepts of projection and introjection, and his focus on creativity and the imagination

acknowledged the importance of understanding popular cultural phenomena that clearly had, and

continue to have, an enormous impact on people’s lives. Among other things, Morin studied the

seemingly trivial fan letters written to movie stars in popular magazines, identifying the

mechanisms of projection and identification in the adulation of “stars.” Again we see Morin

moving from the macro role of popular culture to the micro, the specific examples of individual

gestures of fans towards their idols. This reflects a guiding principle of Morin’s work, found in

Pascal’s statement that it is impossible to understand the whole without understanding the part,

and impossible to understand the part without understanding the whole. In Method, Morin would

later use this as an entry point to critique both reductionism and holism.

But why this sudden detour into cinema? Morin’s research is motivated by his own life

experiences. After the death of his mother, the young Morin became an obsessive moviegoer,

and developed a fascination for the magical experience of cinema. As he explained, they allowed

him to temporarily inhabit and dream of a different world, escape his pain, and immerse himself

in a world of imagination through a ritualistic process not unlike the experiences of our distant

ancestors, glimpses of art illuminated by flickering lights in dark caves. It is a commonplace to

say that one’s research is really a reflection of one’s life. But in Morin’s case this is particularly

evident, and he has been very clear about this in any number of works, perhaps most clearly in

Mes Demons, or My D(a)emons, in which he recounts his intellectual journey and influences

(Morin, 1994b). As I have suggested, this personal dimension, this integration of the inquirer into

the inquiry, is central to his transdisciplinary approach, which is a quest for meaning derived

from personal experience, and clearly from that of millions of other movie-goers.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 46

In 1961, filmmaker Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin made the documentary Chronicle of a

Summer. Set in Paris in the aftermath of the Algerian war and before the explosion of riots that

played such a role in the 1960s, and culminated in the events of Paris 1968, this documentary

holds the distinction of being recognized as the first example of cinema verité. At the heart of it

lies a simple question, asked of Parisians going about their business around town: “Are you

happy?” From that seemingly causal entry point, Roland Barthes wrote that what the

documentary ends up doing is engaging humanity itself.

Chronicle of a Summer had a profound influence on French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard,

and it has become a classic of documentary making and visual anthropology. Chronicle of a

Summer breaks down the barrier between the camera and the subject. It is a precursor to a far

more participatory approach to inquiry and documentaries, as well as the more recent excesses of

(largely manufactured) “reality television.” Particularly important is the self-reflective

dimension, which includes interviewers and interviewees being filmed observing footage of the

interviews, creating a self-reflective loop (Ungar, 2003). This innovative approach shows

Morin’s lifelong concern for intersubjectivity and self-reflection that was later to be articulated

extensively in his works of “sociology of the present” and culminating in complex thought

(Morin, 1994b, 1994c, 2007a). Writing in The New Yorker in February 21, 2013, Richard

Brody’s review of the newly issued DVD described Chronicle as “one of the greatest, most

audacious, most original documentaries ever made, one that poses—and, what’s more, responds

to—questions of cinematic form and moral engagement that underlie the very genre, the very

idea of nonfiction films.”

Morin’s L’esprit du temps, written in 1960-61 and published in 1962 was widely read and

is now a classic volume on popular culture and what has come to be known as the “culture
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 47

industry.” With discussions of topics ranging from revolvers to happy endings (in cinema),

leisure culture and youth culture, happiness and sexuality, Morin was once again breaking new

ground in his discussion of “mass culture,” always in the larger context of social change and

planetary culture.

In 1965, the next step in Morin’s political reflections was published, Introduction à une

Politique de L’homme. Arguments Politiques [Introduction to a politics of humanity. Political

perspectives] (Morin, 1999a). Morin explored the nature of human nature in the political context,

critiquing Marx, Freud, and other thinkers and currents of thought, including a trenchant critique

of the notion of “development,” while developing his notion of a planetary politics and planetary

culture, which he was to elaborate in later works. Essential here was Morin’s excavation of the

underlying assumptions of the various approaches to understanding and framing human nature,

which he was to return to in the work that became the predecessor to his magnum opus, Method,

Le Paradigme Perdu (Morin, 1979).

Morin’s next two works followed somewhat naturally from his cinema verité

documentary. They focused on innovative, participatory approaches to social research, what he

called a “sociology of the present,” using a “multidimensional method.” Both of these works

were fortunately translated into English. The Red and the White (Morin, 1970), a study of

modernization in the Breton village of Plozevet, utilized Morin’s “phenomenographic” approach

(an overview of which is included in this volume), a time when most if not all sociological

research was quantitative. Morin and his research team actively participated in the life of the

village, and collected data in a variety of ways, both quantitative to the qualitative, by living in

the village and keeping diaries about their experience as researchers. These diaries have recently

been published in their entirety (Morin, 2001a). The Red and the White shows Morin’s desire to
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 48

capture the full complexity and richness of this village, and the realization that traditional

quantitative sociological methods simply did not come close to this. They simply did not address

the lived experience of human beings undergoing a major social change. In his review of Morin’s

The Red and the White (Morin, 1970b) in the American Journal of Sociology, William Christian

(Christian, 1971) also highlighted what we have called Morin’s “holographic” approach, writing

that “Morin largely succeeds in his impossible aim to write both about the village and about

France. Indeed, he is writing both about the village and modern Western society in general”

(p.168).

Rumor in Orleans (Morin, 1971) is the fascinating and disturbing account of a rumor that

broke out in May 1969 about an alleged white slave trade conducted by Jews in the city of

Orleans, which had led to panic and attacks on stores owned by Jews. Morin’s research managed

to unravel the web of stories, trace them to their original source, and actually put the rumor to

rest. Again, we see Morin at the leading edge of thought with what would be called “action

research” today. Morin broke down the assumption that research should be quantitative, and

should place the researcher as “the expert” “objectively” studying his “subject.” His research was

also an intervention, and an example of “clinical sociology.” For Morin, this research is also a

critique of universalism, the search for laws and grand theories, and a valorization of what he

called “the event,” the unique, the unrepeatable, the destabilizing moment, and crisis as an

opportunity for inquiry, a subject he was later to explore in his work on “crisiology,” included in

this volume (Morin, 1993).

In the methodological appendix of the book, also reprinted in this volume, Morin (Morin,

1970b) wrote:

Our method seeks to envelop the phenomenon (observation), to recognize the

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 49

forces within it (praxis), to provoke it at strategic points (intervention), to

penetrate it by individual contact (interview), to question action, speech, and

things. Each of these methods poses the fundamental methodological problem: the

relationship between the research worker and the subject.

It is not merely a subject-object relationship. The “object” of the inquiry is both

object and subject, and one cannot escape the intersubjective character of relations

between men. We believe the optimal relationship requires, on the one hand,

detachment and objectivity in relation to the object as object, and on the other,

participation and sympathy in relation to the object as subject. As this object and

subject are one, our approach must be a dual one. (p. 259)

From his work on popular culture to cinema verité to his research approach, we find

Morin challenging assumptions about high and low culture, about the objectivity and distance of

the researcher and the camera, and a critique of expertism that instead favors immersion and

participation in the everyday, and draws on the knowledge of non-specialized participants. This

is part of Morin’s larger thrust to bring the discourse of social science in much closer relationship

to the lived realities of human experience, the contingencies, the seeming trivialities of everyday

experience, the emotions, subjectivities, the actual events and the uniqueness of life in all its

manifestations while at the same time uncovering the epistemological dimension, addressing

how we make sense of the world, how we construct our knowledge.

Opening Up: The Journals

In the early 1960s Morin began publishing selected journals. These were very personal

reflections and explorations that chronicled his experiences from the very mundane to the

dramatic, from the profound philosophical and psychological reflections of Le Vif du Sujet from
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 50

1962 to 1963 (Morin, 1982), to the account of his voyage to China in the 1990s (Morin, 1992b),

to the death of his beloved wife Edwige in 2007 (Morin, 2009a). These documents showed the

author grappling with issues in the moment, and with his own responses to the crises he was

facing, intellectual, political, and personal. The California Journal, available in English (Morin,

2008a), is an account of Morin year-long experience in California in 1969, spent at the Salk

Institute in San Diego, in the company of Jonas Salk, François Jacob, Jacob Bronowski, and

Anthony Wilden, among others. Morin immersed himself in biology, cybernetics and system

theories, which were to play an integral part in Method, and reflected on the dramatic social

changes he was witnessing. This Californian experience was documented in the extended

meditation that was to become California Journal. The Californian sojourn was particularly

transformative for Morin, both personally and intellectually.

Many of his closest colleagues and collaborators have considered Morin’s journals to be

some of his deepest and most significant contributions. The author’s voice, already so vivid in

his scholarly works, becomes even more alive in these pages, as we go behind the scenes during

the writing of a book, during a television appearance, house-hunting in Paris, or at a conference.

Ironically, some of Morin’s journals have been attacked by critics who have found them lacking

the “seriousness” one should find in an intellectual. Academia is still very suspicious of

“subjectivity,” which essentially amounts to the everyday experience of life, and particularly of

the subjectivity of academics themselves. One can deconstruct anything, but the academic

remains at a safe distance, and one’s personal life is not addressed. One’s subjectivity, one’s

domestic life needs to be neatly compartmentalized and strictly separated from one’s life as a

scholar. While it is acceptable to engage in phenomenological research of lived experience—

somebody else’s, of course—it has mostly been feminist scholars who have stressed the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 51

importance of fully integrating the knower in all her vulnerabilities. Morin insists on reminding

us that life is not confined to one or two disciplines, and his life involves, among others, movies,

his wife’s asthma attacks, pets, conferences, friendships, political upheavals, publishers, the

vagaries of travel, the loss of friends and loved ones, and the occasional overindulgence at

dinner. A philosophy of life cannot exclude these moments from its purview.

The pretense of objectivity unsullied by the contingency of life and the life of the subject

has never been something Morin aspired to. In fact, he has been actively working on dismantling

it. He has also been aware that an academic front has all too often acted as a cover for the

immature emotionality and self-deception of academics. Morin breaks away forcefully from the

reductive image of the intellectual as a disembodied brain (often with a huge ego, which goes

unacknowledged, of course, given the stress on objectivity), and opens himself up to us in his

work and in his actions, for scrutiny, exploration, and appreciation, showing himself to us in the

full range of his life experiences and vulnerabilities. As Maturana and Varela remind us,

everything that is said is said by somebody (Maturana & Varela, 1987). In traditional academic

discourse and inquiry, the focus was on the elimination of that “somebody” in search of the

“God’s eye view from nowhere.” As we read Morin, he shows us who the “somebody” is, and

provides us with an example of “embodied” inquiry and personal reflection. With Morin, the

“somebody” is not hidden. The inquirer is not artificially excised from the inquiry, but is rather

integrated in the inquiry.

The personal exploration of his journals have, at times, led us deeply into Morin’s psyche

in ways that would be inconceivable for most traditional social scientists, for whom vulnerability

is not generally considered a virtue. After the death of his wife Edwige, following a period of

mourning Morin wrote a long and extremely revealing book about their relationship, a last love
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 52

letter that included personal notes, drawings they made for each other, and revealed an intimacy,

self-disclosure and emotion one is not accustomed to seeing in academics, even in more

autobiographical works, particularly from a man who at this point was in his eighties and

considered a leading public intellectual (Morin, 2009a).7

Most social scientists, particularly those who express themselves only in the confines of a

professional journal, are mostly not trained to give voice to the whole of their life and

experience. It is generally not part of the education of the social scientist, of the researcher, to

understand him or herself, to be able to explore his or her own personal involvement in the

research, to document that process and reflect on it, to explore the extent to which the

“subjective” and the “objective” co-create each other, let alone deeply question the underlying

assumption of his or her work. Autobiography and self-reflection are often an awkward endeavor

in social science. They are often looked upon with suspicion mixed with grudging admiration. In

his journals, Morin, inspired by Montaigne, is modeling a process of self-inquiry that is also

always holographic because it always occurs within a planetary context—and one might

paraphrase Morin by saying that he lives in a planetary culture, and the planetary culture lives

inside him.

Social science has been comfortable with the context of justification, but not the context

of discovery. Social scientists present themselves by proposing a position, backed up with

empirical data and/or a theoretical framework. Readers are usually not privy to the actual process

of inquiry itself, to the ups and downs of the research, the blind alleys, the mistakes, the insights,

dialogues, and the creative process, unless we read popular (auto)biographies. In such works as

Journal d’un Livre (Morin, 1994a), the journal Morin kept while writing Pour Sortir du XX

Siècle (Morin, 1984), and earlier in Le Vif du Sujet (Morin, 1982), we find insights into the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 53

creative process, and the life of a thinker, struggling to fight off the tendency for dispersion, to

do, read, experience too much, to lose direction and focus in the process. And yet the very

dispersion, while at times painful for the author, is one of the things that makes Morin such an

original thinker, through his ability to later integrate a broad range of experiences, theoretical

perspectives, and insights and the way he shows us how to think about them.

Along with the deeply personal, Morin has also immersed himself in the profoundly

public, through his closely followed public pronouncements on a variety of issues, whether his

impassioned rejection of the Algerian war (Le Sueur, 2003), the events of 1968 in Paris, through

his articles in newspapers and his book with Castoriadis and Lefort on May of ’68 (Morin,

Lefort, & Castoriadis, 1968), his advocacy for Turkey’s entry into the European Union, or his

writings on the Israel-Palestine question (Morin, 2006) and his leading role in French

environmentalism. His critique of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians led to several court

cases triggered by lurid accusations of antisemitism, and an eventual exoneration. In 2006, this

led to the publication of Le Monde Moderne et la Question Juive, or The Modern World and the

Jewish Question, in which, among other things, he stresses the importance of differentiating

between antisemitism and critiques of the Israeli government’s policies toward Palestinians

(Morin, 2006b). Morin is still very much a public intellectual, involved in television debates,

publishing regular op-ed articles in France’s leading newspapers, dialoguing with one of

France’s leading ecologists (Morin & Hulot, 2007), and a member of the French president’s

prestigious committee on ecology. A few weeks after the election of Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007,

Morin was invited to discuss France’s environmental policy with him. The week before François

Hollande was voted into government saw the publication of a book of dialogues between Morin

and Hollande (Hollande & Morin, 2012). Morin is without question one of that dying breed, the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 54

public intellectual. In 2012 he co-authored, with the late Stéphane Hessel, what is sometimes

called the new little red book of the indignados and the European Occupy movement, The Path

to Hope (Hessel & Morin, 2012). Hessel, a nonagenarian at the time, was the author of the best-

selling Indignez vous! (Hessel, 2011), said to have been one of the sparks that lit the Arab

Spring. Most recently Morin has dialogued with Islamic philosopher Tariq Ramadan about their

views of the world, published in two volumes, and with artist and writer Patrick Singaïny about

the Paris attack of January 11th 2015 (Morin & Ramadan, 2014, 2017; Morin & Singaîny, 2015).

Complexity
At first glance, complexity is a fabric (complexus: that which is woven together) of

heterogeneous constituents that are inseparably associated: complexity poses the paradox

of the one and the many. Next, complexity is in fact the fabric of events, actions,

interactions, retroactions, determinations, and chance that constitute our phenomenal

world (Morin, 2008, p. 5).

Morin’s vital involvement in intellectual life has also occurred through a series of major

conferences and dialogues with scientists, artists, and philosophers. Most notable perhaps is the

conference documented in the three-volume L’Unité de L’homme [Human Unity] (Morin &

Piattelli Palmarini, 1978), a multidisciplinary dialogue among primatologists, biologists,

neuroscientists, anthropologists, cyberneticists, sociologists, and a variety of other natural and

social scientists. Participants included systemic sociologist Walter Buckley, neuroscientist Jean-

Pierre Changeux, ethologist Ireneus Eibl-Eibesfesdt, cyberneticist Heinz Von Foerster, Nobel

Prize–winning biologists François Jacob, Jacques Monod, and Salvador E. Luria, neuroscientist

Paul MacLean, biologist Humberto Maturana, social psychologist Serge Moscovici, semioticist

Thomas Sebeok, and cognitive scientist Dan Sperber. The ensuing three volumes of articles and
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 55

discussions were organized as follows: Volume 1 (The Primate and the Human), Volume 2 (The

Human Brain), and Volume 3 (Towards a Fundamental Anthropology).

This extremely rich series of dialogues, orchestrated by Morin and the Italian cognitive

scientist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, represents an important step toward Morin’s

transdisciplinary approach. Transdisciplinarity goes beyond interdisciplinarity, which involves

using the methods of one discipline to inform another, by drawing on multiple disciplines while

actually challenging the disciplinary organization of knowledge, and the reductive/disjunctive

way of thinking that make up what Morin was to call the “paradigm of simplicity.” Several of

Morin’s books find him in dialogues with social and natural scientists, from astrophysicists to

biologists to sociologists and philosophers.8

Le Paradigme Perdu [Paradigm Lost], published in 1973, represents the first step toward

the integration of this transdisciplinary perspective that was later to culminate in the multi-

volume Method. For Morin, healing the split between the natural and social sciences became

essential after his California sojourn and the Human Unity conference. His multidimensional

approach to human nature—and to inquiry in general—could not abide the human/nature split. In

the social sciences, there was either the quantitative approach found in sociology (what Sorokin

called “quantophrenia”), generally anemic attempts to copy the method of physics, or the more

philosophically inclined tendency to reject anything remotely associated with the natural

sciences as reductive, as “scientism” or “biologism.” In natural science, the almost complete

absence of reflection on the role of the inquirer created massive blind spots science itself was

unable to address in its most rigid configuration. As Dortier (Dortier, 2006) points out, Le

Paradigme Perdu was written before the emergence of sociobiology and evolutionary

psychology, but deserves to be read not just out of respect and historical interest for a book that
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 56

was ahead of its time, but because Morin outlined an important agenda and a way of thinking

about the issues that is still extremely fruitful. And this is in many ways Morin’s central

contribution—to point out that there are problems, such as the human/nature or two culture split,

that must be approached with a radically different way of thinking, a way of thinking that, as

Morin states, is not disjunctive (either/or), but connects, without the Hegelian assumption that

the dialectic will always lead to a new synthesis.

First in Le Paradigme Perdu, then in the massive Method (Morin, 1985, 1986, 1991,

1992a, 2003, 2004a), Morin tackles this task by literally circulating knowledge between the

disciplines and opening up a new way of approaching inquiry and knowledge. Morin has called

his approach “en-cyclo-pedic” (Morin, 1992a), but he points out that this is not in the sense of

providing the final word on a catalog of topics, presenting a “totalizing” picture of the world as it

“really” is. He uses the term in the sense of reconnecting that which has been disconnected, and

as with so much of his work we also find multiple plays on words here because there is also a

reference to the virtuous cycles and recursivity of cybernetic thinking and the notion of a path

laid down in walking. Around the time Le Paradigme Perdu was being written, and until quite

recently, thinkers like Lyotard, Habermas, and others were highly critical of the integration of

the natural and social sciences and against systems theoretical approaches in particular (Lyotard,

1984). Lechte’s summary of Lyotard’s position is typical of the way systems theoretical

approaches were summarily dealt with in the last decades of the 20th century in the philosophical

discourse (Lechte, 1994):

For the systems theorist, human beings are part of a homogeneous, stable,

theoretically knowable, and therefore, predictable system. Knowledge is the

means of controlling the system. Even if perfect knowledge does not yet exist, the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 57

equation: the greater the knowledge the greater the power over the system is, for

the systems theorist, irrefutable. (p. 248)

Morin saw the enormous potential of these new approaches while recognizing their

limitations and misuses, refusing to be limited by ideological boundaries. In the process, he

developed his own complex interpretation of systems theory, information theory, and cybernetics

designed to connect the various dimensions of human inquiry, separated as they were in their

own worlds and disciplines, refusing to communicate with each other. Morin is the heir of the

original mission of von Bertalanffy’s General System Theory, of the Macy conferences, of

Arthur Koestler’s Alpbach symposium, in the sense that he has pursued the goal of connecting

knowledge scattered in various disciplines, and providing a way of talking and thinking and

organizing knowledge, a method (M. C. Bateson, 2004; Heims, 1993; Koestler & Smythies,

1972).

Method begins his approach to complexity with an extensive discussion of the

relationship between order and disorder, the key role of emergence, unpredictability, and

uncertainty, and the importance of the prefix re-, as in reorganization, rethinking, and so on,

suggesting ongoing process and change (Morin, 2005c). Morin could not be as easily dismissed

as traditional sociological systems thinkers such as Talcott Parsons. In the United States, the very

fact that he did not fit neatly into one camp and could himself not be reduced to some simple

category (systems theorist, structuralist, postmodernist, post-structuralist) has led to a few

misinformed assessments of his work. This is also because only a very small number of his

books have been translated into English, giving a very partial view of a multidimensional body

of work.

The six-volume Method is Morin’s magnum opus. Method integrates the rich and diverse
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 58

elements of Morin’s journey and provides the reader with an alternative to the traditional

assumptions and methods of inquiry of our time. Morin’s method outlines steps towards a way of

approaching inquiry that does not reduce or separate, and does justice to the complexity of life

and experience. In his sociopolitical works, such as his prescient studies on the USSR and

totalitarianism, on the nature and concept of Europe, his “manifesto for the 21st century,”

Homeland Earth (Morin & Kern, 1999), and La Voie (The Way) (Morin, 2011a), Morin applied

this method to the planetary crisis in what he calls this “planetary Iron Age.”

We sense that we are approaching a considerable revolution (so considerable that

perhaps it will not take place) in the great paradigm of Western science. What

affects a paradigm, that is, the vault key of a whole system of thought, affects the

ontology, the methodology, the epistemology, the logic, and by consequence, the

practices, the society, and the politics? The ontology of the West was founded on

closed entities such as substance, identity, (linear) causality, subject, object. These

entities do not communicate amongst themselves. Oppositions provoke repulsions

or canceling of a concept by another (e.g., subject/object). “Reality” could be

grasped by clear and distinct ideas.

In this sense, scientific methodology was reductionist and quantitative.

The logic of the West was a homeostatic logic and destined to maintain the

equilibrium of the discourse by banning contradiction and deviation. Imagination,

illumination, and creation, without which the progress of science would not have

been possible, only entered science on the sly. They could not be logically

identified, and were always epistemologically condemnable. They are spoken of

in the biographies of great scientists, but never in manuals and treatises … it is

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 59

obviously the whole structure of the system of thought that is finding itself

thoroughly shaken and transformed. (Morin, 2008, pp. 34-35)

Morin’s quest for Method draws on systems theory, cybernetics and information theory,

but his efforts predate the rise of what is now popularly known as complexity theory (Fisher,

2009; Johnson, 2002; Waldrop, 1993). The first volume of Method was published in 1977, and

Morin’s interest and application of some of the precursors to these key ideas goes back to his

first major work, L’Homme et la Mort, and his early reading of Hegel (Morin, 1994b, 2012).

While there is some obvious overlap with complexity theorists, Morin’s work is a broader

philosophical and specifically epistemological effort to, in his words (Morin, 2007), develop a

“reform of thought.” In an essay in this volume, Morin refers to mathematical approaches to

complexity that still draw on a classical epistemology as “restricted complexity.” This is

contrasted with “general complexity,” which requires a fundamental rethinking of what we

consider knowledge and how we think. We should therefore not think of Morin’s approach as an

attempt to use “complexity theory,” as it is known in the United States, and particularly of the

Santa Fe Institute variety, to address issues in the sciences or philosophy, even if we can find

some conceptual parallels, not the least of which are the critique of reductionism and disciplinary

fragmentation (Alhadeff-Jones, 2008; Taylor, 2003; Urry, 2005; Waldrop, 1992; Wells, 2013).

As the quotation above indicates, Morin is fundamentally critiquing the foundations of

scientific and philosophical inquiry. He critiques what might be called a paradigm of simplicity,

drawing on Descartes’s focus on simplification and clear and simple ideas. One way to illustrate

this effort is through his critique of disciplinarity. Disciplinarity reflects a way of thinking, and

also a way of organizing knowledge in the form of ever-greater specialization in disciplines that
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 60

are generally closed to each other. Morin (Morin, 2008c) writes that: “The deep cause of error is

not error of fact (false perception), or error of logic (incoherence), but rather the way we

organize our knowledge into a system of ideas (theories, ideologies)” (p. 2).

Economists can make pronouncements about a society’s economy without reference to

psychology, sociology, or any other discipline, and concepts like development were articulated

drawing mostly on quantitative indicators such as GDP and GNP. Even within a discipline such

as psychology, we find that personality psychologists and social psychologists, for instance,

mostly do not communicate, and if they do, it is mostly to dismiss each other’s views. In fact, we

can see in the history of thought how many of the main movements have defined themselves in

opposition to each other (Collins, 1998). Science originally defined itself in opposition to

religion, of course, and underlying the oppositional movements in the history of ideas we have

large dualisms in the form of C.P. Snow’s two cultures, as well as realism/idealism,

spiritual/material, nature/nurture, and subjective/objective, for instance.

In the tradition of such writers as Bachelard, Bateson, and others (Bachelard, 2002; G.

Bateson, 2002; Capra, 1996; Taylor, 2003), Morin’s work is a sustained epistemological

reflection on the implications of the scientific and cultural revolution of the 20th century for our

organization of, and relationship with, knowledge. Morin (Morin & Kern, 1999) writes:

The reductionist approach, which consists in relying on a single series of factors to

regulate the totality of problems associated with the multiform crisis we are currently in

the middle of, is less a solution than the problem itself….

Intelligence that is fragmented, compartmentalized, mechanistic, disjunctive, and

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 61

reductionistic breaks the complexity of the world into disjointed pieces, splits up

problems, separates that which is linked together, and renders unidimensional the

multidimensional … The more problems are multidimensional, the less chance

there is to grasp the crisis. The more problems become planetary, the more

unthinkable they become. Incapable of seeing the planetary context in all its

complexity, blind intelligence fosters unconsciousness and irresponsibility. It has

become the bearer of death. (p. 1)

Morin is critical of the great fragmentation in the way we have organized knowledge,

with specialists in a huge number of disciplines and sub-disciplines each working on their

problems in splendid isolation. The notion of transdisciplinarity therefore emerges as an attempt

to not only connect the various forms of knowledge pertinent to a specific problem, but also to

propose a different way of thinking (Morin, 2008d).

One of the patterns that connects Morin’s considerable contributions in such varied fields

as biology and cinema, sociology and ecology, is the quest for a generative way of approaching

the subject matter that accounts in a way for its complexity, for that which is woven together,

accounts for patterns, relationships, interactions, disorder, and noise. It is not a method in the

sense of a new research method. What Morin calls method, is understood in the broadest sense of

the word, as a “way” or “path laid down in walking.” As the noted Italian family systems

therapist Mara Selvini Palazzoli (1990) argues: “As Edgar Morin has put it so shrewdly, ‘the

method emerges from the research.’ Originally, he points out, the word method meant path; it is

only in traveling that the right method appears” (p. xiv).

How do we engage in inquiry? How do we think about the world, and more specifically,

how do we approach research? Above all, how do we organize knowledge? How can we live and
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 62

think in a pluralistic universe, with complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity? Morin reminds us

that even our best efforts to integrate knowledge do not escape incompleteness, partiality, error,

and illusion. Morin challenges us therefore to integrate also this uncertainty and incompleteness

in our knowing and being, and invites us to retain an ongoing critical self-reflection, cultivating

a spirit of openness to learning from other traditions and perspectives, as well consider the

embodiment of knowledge in the moment, with its inevitable uncertainties, dilemmas, and

opportunities.

Iain Chambers (1993), who has written extensively on the subject of cultural complexity,
writes:
The idea of both lived and intellectual complexity, of Edgar Morin’s ‘la pensée

complexe’, introduces us to a social ecology of being and knowledge. Here both

thought and everyday activities move in the realm of uncertainty. Linear argument

and certainty break down as we find ourselves orbiting in a perpetual paradox

around the wheel of being: we bestow sense, yet we can never be certain in our

proclamations. The idea of cultural complexity, most sharply on display in the

arabesque patterns of the modern metropolis—and that includes Lagos as well as

London, Beijing, and Buenos Aires—weakens earlier schemata and paradigms; it

destabilizes and decenters previous theories and sociologies. Here the narrow

arrow of linear progress is replaced by the open spiral of hybrid cultures,

contaminations, and what Edward Said recently referred to as ‘atonal ensembles’.

The city suggests creative disorder, an instructive confusion, an interpolating

space in which the imagination carries you in every direction, even towards the

previously unthought. (p. 189)

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 63

The key elements of the organization of knowledge in the West go far back in history and the

work of Aristotle and Descartes is central (Gembillo, 2008a). Aristotle developed a “logic,”

providing us with the laws of identity and the excluded middle. In his Discourse on Method,

Descartes (Descartes, 1954) explored the basic laws of thinking, and fashioned them into the

foundations for inquiry. Descartes spoke of a “method,” and of “rules for the direction of the

mind.” In other words, Descartes was providing us with an orientation for the way we think, a

focus on reduction, simplification, and clarity. What Descartes proposed as rules for the direction

of mind has, coupled with Aristotle’s logic, become the foundation for “good thinking”

institutionalized in the organization of universities. There we find the same increasing

specialization in departments, disciplines and sub-disciplines, literally a splitting up into the

smallest possible parts, and the creation of strong boundaries based on three axioms of classical

logic (Nicolescu, 2002). Morin’s effort arguably involves a revision of these age-old foundations

that integrates them into a broader “method” based on complexity.

Morin’s Complex Thought critiques what has been thought of as “good” thinking, and

takes us to the heart of the what for him is the problem, namely reduction, disjunction, and

abstraction: inquiry and thinking that decontextualizes, simplifies, and functions on a logic of

either/or. How are we to address this? Morin articulates an alternative that emphasizes

complexity, from the Latin complexus, or that which is woven together. That which is woven

together cannot be torn apart without losing the overall pattern, without losing the connection,

the interrelationships, the interactions, the emergent properties.

One of the recurring quotations we find in Morin’s work is from Pascal (Pascal, Molinier,

& Paul, 1905) articulating the relationship between parts and wholes:
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 64

All that exists then is both cause and effect, dependent and supporting, mediate

and immediate, and all is held together by a natural though imperceptible bond,

which unites things most distant and most different. I consider it impossible to

know the parts without knowing the whole, or to know the whole without

knowing the parts. (p. 25)

Morin develops this in an extensive discussion of the relationship of part to whole, including a

critique of holism as well as reductionism, and reflects his effort to go beyond such polarizations

in the history of thought (Morin, 2008c).9 In fact, Complex Thought informs a reframing of such

conceptual dualisms as unity and diversity, order and disorder, unity and multiplicity, the one

and the many.

Morin draws extensively on systems theory, but it must be understood that this is not part

of an effort to “map” the environment, something many systems theorists have attempted to do,

and have also been critiqued for doing. Morin is interested in a crucial aspect of the original

mission of system and cybernetic theories, namely the development of a transversal approach

that can provide a way to think across disciplinary specializations, and in the process connect

rather than separate (M. C. Bateson, 2004; Heims, 1991).

One area where Morin’s work is of great interest is in the articulation of the relationship

between the individual and society, and particularly the role of culture, and relationship between

culture and the individual. Morin seeks to articulate the nature of interactions and the circularity

and recursive nature of processes. He focuses for instance on the way individuals are in society

and society is also in individuals, and the way human beings create culture that in turn creates

human beings. These complex, circular processes provide an alternative to the all-too frequent
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 65

tendency of reductive and disjunctive thought to focus on either individual (methodological

individualism) or social/cultural (methodological holism).

For Morin, the issue is addressing the problems of thinking, and this is where his work

and specifically his articulation of Complex Thought, begins to show considerable parallels with

efforts to articulate post-formal ways of thinking.10 Herbert Koplowitz (1984) argues strongly

for the relationship between general system theory and post-formal thought: “Formal operational

thought is dualistic. It draws sharp distinctions between the knower and the known, between one

object (or variable) and another, and between pairs of opposites (e.g., good and bad).” Elsewhere

Koplowitz writes that, “In post-formal operational thought, the knower is seen as unified with the

known, various objects (and variables) are seen as part of a continuum, and opposites are seen as

poles of one concept” (as cited in Kegan, 1982, p. 32).

In Method, we see Morin articulating and utilizing and many of what Koplowitz

describes as the key principles of post-formal thought to fundamental problems in nature,

biology, cognition, sociology, and ethics, drawing from, while also critiquing, systems theory

and cybernetics. Throughout Method, starting with the first volume published 1977, The Nature

of Nature, we find, among many other topics, extensive discussions of recurring themes in

Morin’s work, such as the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the relationship of order and

disorder, culminating in Morin’s tetragram of order/disorder/interactions/organization; the

development of Angyal’s (Angyal, 1941) notion of unitas multiplex in terms of the relationship

between part and whole, as well as unity and diversity; the systems dictum that the whole is more

than the sum of the parts, complexified to recognize that the whole can also be less than the sum

of the parts; an articulation of the notion of autonomy, particularly in relationship to dependence,

normally viewed as opposite, recontextualized, and recomplexified by Morin to show their

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 66

interrelationship; an effort to ground the notion of the subject in the logic of the living, which

Morin considers his most original (and perhaps least recognized) contribution, discussed

eloquently in Italian sociologist Sergio Manghi’s monograph on Morin (S. Manghi, 2009); the

importance of contextualization, adding the prefix -eco to self-organization, leading to the term

self-eco-organization and an increased awareness of the role of the environment (Morin, 2008c);

and as always, the continuous epistemological reflection that integrates the observer and the

context, and recognizes the incompleteness of any perspective and any system of categories.

Morin has made a sustained and important contribution to the reform of education,

initially in 1997 at the invitation of the French Minister of Education, Claude Allègre. Morin

responded with several books including the proceedings of a conference with participants such as

Henri Atlan, Paul Ricoeur, Jean-Louis Le Moigne, Joël De Rosnay, and many others (Morin,

1999). Morin’s proposals, summarized in 7 Complex Lessons in Education for the Future, are,

not surprisingly, quite radical (Morin, 2001). If their immediate implementation seems unlikely,

they certainly provide a vital blueprint for the future, and are already beginning to have an

influence in curriculum theory and development (Alhadeff-Jones, 2009, 2010; Bocchi & Ceruti,

2004; Gembillo, Anselmo, & Giordano, 2008; Montuori, 2010; Morin, Ciurana, & Motta, 2003;

Rosetto Ajello, 2003).

Complex Thought
Yan and Arlin (1999) write that

[I]n Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, equilibration is the goal of

development. Formal reasoning is considered the final equilibrium. The major

characteristic of formal reasoning is the ability to engage in abstract logical

thinking, which includes the features of hypothetico-deductive reasoning, thinking

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 67

in terms of propositions, and making logical inferences. Generally speaking,

formal reasoning operates on well-defined problems that can be presented by

closed systems. For well-defined problems, all the information necessary to

produce a solution is given or can be derived from what is given. In this case it is

possible to produce one or a few solutions and creativity is not required in the

process. (p. 550)

Piaget (1970) himself stated that formal operational thinking constitutes the “essence of the logic

of educated adults, as well as the basis of the elementary forms of scientific thought” (p. 6).

It is therefore interesting to note that one of Morin’s central criticisms of traditional

“simple” thought is precisely that it assumes a world made up of closed systems (Morin, 2008c).

In Method, Morin articulates the importance of the notion of open system. He spends several

hundred pages outlining the quite dramatic implications of a concept that is all-too often taken as

a foundation of systems thinking, but surprisingly undertheorized. Morin also points to the

problematic nature of discussing open and closed systems as opposites when in fact the

relationship is more complex, and every open system is also, to some extent closed, and the role

of the inquirer in making the choice of treating a system as either open or closed. The complexity

of open systems leads him to questions about the crucial nature of any system’s relationship with

its environment, the nature of autonomy, the opposition between reductionism and holism, the

possibility of emergence, and self-organization, or as Morin revisions it, self-eco-organization

(Morin, 2008c).

Yan and Arlin point out that formal reasoning does not work well with problems that are

not well defined, and we should add that it is also deeply problematic working with contingency

and the unexpected. Uncertainty and disorder are central to Morin’s world, and indeed as we
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 68

have seen, he uses the term chaosmos to great effect, articulated in his tetrad of

Order/Disorder/Interaction/Organization. If the paradigm that is now crumbling was based on the

assumptions of order and certainty, with disorder as the enemy (Toulmin, 1992), Morin is

certainly not promoting a world of chaos and nihilism. On the contrary, his focus is on

acknowledging the existence of disorder, and illuminating its generative role. We learn from

Morin to see the key, dominant concepts of order and certainty that have guided and informed

our thinking, and throughout his work we spend considerable time exploring these concepts in

great depth to come out the other side with more complex concepts that do not reject uncertainty

and disorder, but acknowledge and incorporate them as part of an ongoing dialogic.

Many have long believed – and perhaps many still do – that the deficiency in the human

and social sciences lay in their inability to rid themselves of the apparent complexity of

human phenomena, and be elevated to the dignity of natural sciences, the sciences which

established simple laws, simple principles, and obeyed the rule of determinism. Today we

can see that biological and physical sciences are characterized by the crisis of simple

explanations. As a result, what appeared to be non-scientific residues of the human

sciences –uncertainty, disorder, contradiction, plurality, complication, and so on – are

now a part of the fundamental problems of scientific knowledge. (Morin, 1985, p. 49, my

trans.)

Morin’s introduction to the 2008 French boxed-set of his Method is titled “Mission

Impossible.” Morin starts with the assumption that there is no way to completely escape error,

uncertainty, and illusion, and that any effort such as his, is hopeless. For Morin, “We are

condemned to uncertain thought, a thought riddled with holes, a thought that has no foundation

of absolute certainty” (p. 46). Yet we have to think, and we have to live, and despite the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 69

impossible nature of his mission, Morin has, like the characters in the television show,

proceeded. And the mission then becomes, to some extent, how to learn to live despite, and with,

uncertainty, and also how to turn uncertainty into an opportunity for creativity. There is therefore

the continuous stress on the incompleteness of every point of view, which leads to continuous

self-scrutiny, and the integration of the observer in the observation. Morin is critical of totalizing

approaches, painfully aware of the dangers of absolutism, of the illusion of knowledge. At the

same time, he is also critical of the partial nature of much thinking and many approaches, while

recognizing the inevitably limited nature of his own attempt to be en-cyclo-pedic.

Morin therefore places great emphasis on the continuous need for self-awareness, for an

awareness of the pitfalls of hubris, self-deception, projection, and other processes in the inquirer.

We also see constant warnings about idealization, or the idea that the real can be captured in an

idea, which is more real than the real; in rationalization, or the desire to enclose reality in the

order and coherence of a system, without letting anything exist outside the system; and

normalization, or removing all unknowns, mysteries, anything which cannot be explained. The

participation of the observer in every observation, the role of self-reflection and self-inquiry in

inquiry, the dangers of reduction and disjunction, and the often hidden motives of the quest for

certainty will be central and recurring themes in all of Morin’s work.

Morin’s effort to remain constantly vigilant and self-critical, in tandem with the often-

repeated dictum from Adorno, “totality is untruth,” reminds us of the importance for any effort to

confront our current crises to be wary of totalization, of idealization, normalization,

rationalization, and self-deception. It is a reminder of the ways in which human beings use,

misuse, and mutilate knowledge for their own purposes, often unconsciously, and at the same

time the way in which inquiry can become a practice of ongoing self-examination and a way to
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 70

embrace uncertainty and contingency in our thinking and living. It is also a reminder that thought

is not an abstract category that can be separated from our psyche (from our emotions, needs, and

desires) and from our environment (the sociology of knowledge, the planetary era).

Morin is a “complex” thinker not only in terms of his life’s work, the development of

Complex Thought, but also as an embodiment of complexity himself, with his diverse

background, his critical and creative use of sources, his development of a radical and radically

integrative approach to inquiry, and its application to politics, environmental issues, the arts,

ethics, and biology, among others. Morin reminds us that every form of knowledge, every

theory, is a construction that draws on specific sources (and not others), a result of choices, that

in turn are shaped by historical circumstances and contingencies as well as the personal

preferences of the theorists. This process of construction gives us an indication of the limitations

of any view, no matter how capacious and integrative it is, but also points to the openness of the

creative process that is involved in any such construction—the ongoing dance of constraints and

possibilities that marks all paths of inquiry (Ceruti, 1994). In the process, Morin illuminates the

creativity of being and knowing, and invites us to participate in the creative process that is

existence.

Alfonso Montuori

San Francisco

November 2017

Notes
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 71

1. In the US, criticism of Morin’s work has taken wildly contradictory forms. In a generous

mood, one assumes this is because critics are basing their assessments on extremely limited

readings of Morin’s work, since hardly any of Morin’s work has been available in English

until recently. In admittedly brief, often ill-informed and even bizarre references, Morin has

variously been portrayed as the epitome of the French postmodern mood, an anti-ecological

anything-goes relativist for whom the Universe is nothing but disconnected atoms, but also as

a scientific modernist writing before, and therefore not informed by, postmodernism. This

despite the fact that the first volume of Method was published in 1977, and the last one,

Ethics, in 2004 which makes the criticism embarrassingly ethnocentric considering that many

of the key texts of what was later to be called “postmodernism” in the U.S. were published in

France in the Sixties and Morin was very well aware of them and their authors). We see him

portrayed as a rather romantic psychoanalytically oriented cinema scholar focused on

subjectivity and imagination at the expense political critique, and elsewhere as a reductionist

politically oriented systems theorist with no sensitivity for art, interiority and

intersubjectivity. The point is that the transdisciplinary, expansive nature of Morin’s work is

one of the things that makes him such an exciting and important thinker, but it can also be the

source of much confusion and misunderstanding, particularly when complexity is met by the

urge for simplistic categorizations based on ill-informed readings by authors who have

neither read him nor understood him.

2. At the same time, we should remember that despite these impressive achievements and

honors, Morin was for a long time an “outsider” in France. He also never identified with the

popular French postmodern vogue so popular in the United States, and was often quite

critical of it. Morin was therefore not part of the “postmodern” movement in vogue in the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 72

U.S. In his work one does not find reference to how just about everything can be reduced to

the role of language, text, or structures. In fact, as all these ideas were taking wing across the

Atlantic, and some French and American scholars were celebrating the death of the subject,

or even making the subject disappear completely, Morin was engaging in the wildly

countercultural but arguably pathbreaking task of grounding the self in its pre-cognitive,

biological origin.

3. For a useful introduction to Morin in English, the reader is referred to Myron Kofman’s

Edgar Morin: From Big Brother to Fraternity, in the Pluto Press Modern European Thinkers

series (Kofman, 1996). Kofman is particularly good on the historical context and Morin’s

experience with Hegelian-Marxism. Given the relatively limited space here, and the vast

range of Morin’s experience, I will refer to Kofman’s work for a discussion of this

fascinating period and its influence on Morin’s thought. Morin’s Homeland Earth (Morin &

Kern, 1999) offers an accessible introduction to his sociopolitical and moral thought intended

for a popular readership. On Complexity provides key introductory essays to Morin’s work

on complex thought and the notion of the subject (Morin, 2008c).

4. A thoughtful discussion of the role Morin’s mother’s death played in his life can be found in

Heinz Weinmann’s introduction to the collection of Morin essays entitled La Complexitè

Humaine (Morin, 1994b), in many of Morin’s autobiographical works, and most recently the

publication of a novel the young Morin wrote inspired by his loss, L’isle de Luna (Morin,

2017).

5. Typically, academic research is oriented by of a lot of factors such as funding and

differentiation from other disciplines that have nothing to do with what might be best for the

inquiry itself (Wilshire, 1990).

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 73

6. The two books on cinema have been published in the United States by the University of

Minnesota, the work on Stars being a reissue (Morin, 2005a, 2005b).

7. While Morin has always been very open to religion and spiritual experience, he has also

retained a considerable degree of skepticism about mysticism and spirituality. Reading his

journals (the two volumes of his collected journals run over 2,000 pages), one reads about

experiences with altered states and moments of possession as well as transcendence, but they

have not been addressed explicitly in his more scholarly work to any great extent. In an

appendix to his California Journal, Morin discusses his reticence to write about what he

describes as his “happiness” in California, attributing it to a Middle Eastern superstition

about publicly discussing one’s well-being, but one suspects that given the French

intellectual climate, in which his journals were already viewed askance by some more

traditional academics, Morin was perhaps concerned that an explicit discussion of his own

personal experiences, or moving into what might be called a more transpersonal direction

might further marginalize him. Nevertheless, throughout Morin’s massive oeuvre there are

the constant, recurring themes of wisdom, in the form of complex thought, and compassion,

explicitly addressed as love, particularly in Volume 2 of Method. Readers with a

transpersonal orientation may find that Morin’s work resonates quite strongly with many of

the world’s great wisdom traditions. In a recent book-length interview Morin was unusually

candid about his views, discussing, among other things, his interest in ayahuasca (Morin,

2008b).

8. To give an idea of the breadth of Morin’s interlocutors, he is featured prominently in books

on the implications of the work of Ilya Prigogine (Spire, 1999), in a volume on complexity

theory along with Francisco Varela, Brian Goodwin, Stuart Kauffman and Prigogine, among
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 74

others (Benkirane, 2006), debates with Réné Thom and Michel Serres (Morin, 1983), in a

dialogue on memory and responsibility with the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas (de Saint

Cheron, 2000), in dialogue with astrophysicists Michel Cassé (Cassé & Morin, 2003) and

Hubert Reeves (Morin & Le Moigne, 1999), and ecologist Michel Hulot (Morin & Hulot,

2007. I mention his scientific dialogues in particular because of the perception in the United

States that French intellectual “impostors” have misappropriated and misrepresented science

(Sokal & Bricmont, 1998). In Morin’s case, this is certainly not the case. In fact, we find that

he actually contributes to the articulation of the implications of the new sciences for scientists

themselves (Roux-Rouquié, 2002; Westbroek, 2004). The proceedings of the prestigious

Colloque de Cerisy, a yearly symposium focused on the work of a single thinker, includes

Henri Atlan, Cornelius Castoriadis, Gianluca Bocchi, Sergio Manghi, Mauro Ceruti, and

Isabelle Stengers, among others, give further indication of Morin’s breadth and influence

(Bougnoux et al., 1990).

9. The interested reader is referred to Brian Fay’s illuminating work on the philosophy of social

science (Fay, 1996) in which, inspired by Robert Kegan’s work (Kegan, 1982, 1998), he

outlines a series of polarizations in the history of ideas such as atomism versus holism).

10. Morin himself has not addressed these similarities and has not, as far as I am aware, ever

discussed post-formal thought.

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 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 84

Section 1: Complexity: Method

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 85

Chapter 1: A New Way of Thinking

Complexity represents a shift away from the simplifying, reductionist approach that has
traditionally shaped scientific enquiry.
Until the mid-twentieth century, most sciences based their method on specialization and

abstraction, i.e. reducing knowledge of a whole to knowledge of its constituent parts (as though

the organization of a whole did not generate new properties in relation to those of its separate

parts). Their key concept was determinism, in other words the denial of random factors and new

factors and the application of the mechanical logic of artificial machines to the problems of

living beings and social life.

Knowledge must make use of abstraction, but it must also be constructed by reference to

context and hence must mobilize what the enquirer knows about the world. Individual facts can

only be fully understood by those who maintain and cultivate their general intelligence and

mobilize their overall knowledge. Admittedly, it is impossible to know everything about the

world or to grasp its many and varied transformations. But no matter how difficult this may be,

an attempt must be made to understand the key problems of the world, for otherwise we would

be cognitive idiots. This is particularly true today because the context of all political, economic,

anthropological and ecological knowledge has become global. As a result of globalization,

everything must be situated in the planetary context. Knowledge of the world as such is

necessary both for intellectual satisfaction and for life itself. Every citizen faces the problem of

gaining access to information about the world, and then of piecing it together and organizing it.

To do this, a new form of thinking is needed.

In the first place, the kind of thinking that separates must be supplemented with a kind of

thinking that makes connections. Complexus means “that which is woven together”. Complex

thought is a kind of thought that unites distinction with conjunction. Secondly, it is necessary to
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 86

come to grips with uncertainty. The dogma of universal determinism has collapsed. The universe

is not subject to the absolute sovereignty of order; it is the outcome of a “dialogical” relationship

(a relationship that is both antagonistic, concurrent and complementary) between order, disorder

and organization.

Complexity thus connects (contextualizes and globalizes) and also comes to grips with

the challenge of uncertainty. How does it do this?

The Three Theories

One approach to complexity is provided by three theories information theory, cybernetics and

systems theory. These theories, which are closely related and indeed inseparable, emerged in the

early 1940s and have had a far-reaching cross-fertilizing effect on one another.

Information theory gives access to a universe where there are both order (redundancy) and

disorder (noise) and derives something new from it, i.e. information itself, which then becomes

the organizing (programming) instrument of a cybernetic machine. For example, information that

gives the name of the victor of a battle resolves an uncertainty. Information that announces the

sudden death of a tyrant introduces an unexpected new element into a situation.

Cybernetics is a theory of self-controlling machines. The idea of feedback, introduced by the

U.S. mathematician Norbert Wiener, breaks with the idea of linear causality and introduces that

of the causal loop. The cause acts on the effect and the effect on the cause, as in a heating system

where a thermostat controls the operation of a boiler. This regulatory mechanism makes the

system autonomous, in this case ensuring that an apartment has thermic autonomy from the

colder temperature outside. The feed-back loop may act as an amplifying mechanism, e.g. in a

situation where an armed conflict reaches a critical stage. The violence of one adversary triggers

off a violent reaction which in turn triggers off another, even more violent reaction. Very many
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 87

instances of this sort of inflationary or stabilizing feedback can be found in economic, social,

political or psychological phenomena.

Systems theory provides the basis of a way of thinking about organization. The first lesson of

systems analysis is that “the whole is more than the sum of its parts”. This means that properties

emerge from the organization of a whole and may have a retroactive effect on the parts. For

instance, water is an emergent property of the hydrogen and oxygen of which it is composed.

The whole is also less than the sum of its parts, since the parts may have properties that are

inhibited by the organization of the whole.

Self-organization
In addition to these three theories are a number of conceptual developments related to the idea of

self-organization. Four names that must be mentioned in this context are those of John von

Neumann, Heinz von Foerster, Henri Atlan and Ilya Prigogine. In his theory of automata, von

Neumann considered the difference between artificial automata and “living machines”. He

pointed to the paradox whereby the components of artificial machines, although very well

designed and engineered, deteriorate as soon as the machine starts to operate. Living machines,

on the other hand, are made of extremely unreliable components, such as proteins, which are

constantly subject to deterioration. However, these machines have the unusual property of being

able to develop and reproduce themselves; they regenerate themselves through replacing

damaged molecules by new molecules, and dead cells by new cells. An artificial machine cannot

repair itself, whereas a living machine constantly regenerates when its cells die. It is, as

Heraclitus put it, “life from death and death from life”.

Von Foerster’s contribution is his discovery of the principle of “order from noise”. If a

box containing a haphazardly arranged collection of cubes, each magnetized on two faces, is
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 88

shaken, the cubes spontaneously form themselves into a coherent whole. A principle of order

(magnetization) plus disordered energy have created an ordered organization. In this way, order

is created from disorder.

Henri Atlan has developed the theory of “random organization”. At the birth of the

universe there was an order/disorder/organization dialogic triggered off by calorific turbulence

(disorder), in which, under certain conditions (random encounters) organizing principles made

possible the creation of nuclei, atoms, galaxies and stars. This dialogic recurred when life

emerged via encounters between macro-molecules within a kind of self-productive loop which

eventually became a living self-organization. The dialogic between order, disorder and

organization exists in a wide variety of forms, and via countless feedback processes is constantly

in action in the physical, biological and human worlds.

Prigogine introduced the idea of self-organization from disorder in a different way. In so-

called Rayleigh-Bénard convection cells, coherent structures are formed and maintained between

two temperature levels when a thin layer of silicone oil is carefully heated. In order to be

sustainable, these structures need supplies of energy which they consume and dissipate. Living

beings have sufficient autonomy to draw energy from their environment and even extract

information from it and absorb its organization. I have called this process auto-eco-organization.

The study of complex phenomena can thus be seen as a building with several floors. The

ground floor consists of the three theories (information, cybernetics and systems) and contains

the tools needed to develop a theory of organization. On the second floor are the ideas of von

Neumann, von Foerster, Atlan and Prigogine on self-organization. I have added some other

features to the building, notably the dialogical principle, the recursion principle and the

hologrammatic principle.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 89

The Three Principles

The dialogical principle brings together two antagonistic principles or notions which on

the face of things should repel one another but are in fact indissociable and essential for

understanding a single reality. The physicist Niels Bohr believed that physical particles should be

regarded as both corpuscles and waves. Blaise Pascal said that the “the opposite of a truth is not

an error but a contrary truth.” Bohr put this in the following terms: “The opposite of a trivial

truth is a stupid error, but the opposite of a profound truth is always another profound truth”. The

problem is that of combining antagonistic notions in order to envisage the organizational and

creative processes in the complex world of human life and history.

The principle of organizational recursion goes further than the feedback principle; it

goes beyond the idea of regulation to that of self-production and self-organization. It is a

generating loop in which products and effects themselves produce and cause what produces

them. Thus we, as individuals, are the products of an age-old system of reproduction, but this

system can reproduce itself only if we ourselves become its producers by procreating. Individual

human beings produce society in and through their interactions, but society, as an emerging

whole, produces the humanity of individuals by conferring language and culture on them.

The “hologrammatic” principle highlights the apparent paradox of certain systems

where not only is the part present in the whole, but the whole is present in the part: the totality of

the genetic heritage is present in each individual cell. In the same way, the individual is part of

society but society is present in every individual, through his or her language, culture and

standards.

Conclusion
Thinking in terms of complexity is clearly not a mode of thought that replaces certainty with

uncertainty, separation with inseparability, and logic with all kinds of special exceptions. On the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 90

contrary, it involves a constant toing and froing between certainty and uncertainty, between the

elementary and the global, between the separable and the inseparable. The aim is not to abandon

the principles of classical science order, separability and logic but to absorb them into a broader

and richer scheme of things. The aim is not to set a vacuous all-purpose holism against

systematic reductionism, but to attach the concreteness of the parts to the totality. Linkage must

be made between the principles of order and disorder, separation and connection, autonomy and

dependence, which are at one and the same time complementary, concurrent and antagonistic.

In short, complex thought is not the opposite of simplifying thought; it incorporates

simplifying thought. As Hegel might have put it, it unites simplicity and complexity and

ultimately reveals its own simplicity. In fact, the paradigm of complexity can be described just as

simply as that of simplicity. Whereas the latter requires us to dissociate and reduce, the paradigm

of complexity requires us to connect as well as to distinguish.

Complex thought is essentially thought which incorporates uncertainty and is capable of

conceiving organization. It is capable of linking, contextualizing and globalizing but can at the

same time acknowledge what is singular and concrete.

Note
Reproduced from the UNESCO Courier, February 1996, at https://en.unesco.org/courier/secrets-

complexity. Accessed: December 20, 2017.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 91

Chapter 2: The Spirit of the Valley1

Translation by Roland Belanger with revisions by Amy Heath-Carpentier

Awake, they sleep.

Heraclitus.

To reach the point you don't know, you must take the road you don't know.
San Juan de la Cruz.

The concept of science is neither absolute nor eternal.

Jacob Bronowski.

Personally, I think that there is at least one problem...that interests all persons who think: the

problem of understanding the world, ourselves, and our knowledge inasmuch as it is part of the

world.

Karl Popper.

What Absconded from the Paradigm

I am more and more convinced that the problems whose urgency binds us to the present require

us to break away from them in order to consider them in their depth.

I am more and more convinced that the principles of our knowledge hide that which is

indispensable for us to know.

I am more and more convinced that the relationship between,

[insert Fig 1 here]

when it is not invisible, continues to be poorly dealt with, because two of the terms have been

swallowed up by the third, which has now become dominant.

I am more and more convinced that the concepts that we use to conceive our society—all of

society—are mutilated and lead to actions that are inevitably mutilating.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 92

I am more and more convinced that anthropo-social science needs to establish links with

the natural sciences and that this articulation requires a reorganization of the very structure of

knowledge.

But the encyclopedic breadth and the unfathomably radical nature of these problems

inhibit and discourage us, and so the very recognition of their importance contributes to divert us

from them. As far as I am concerned, I needed exceptional circumstances and conditions2 in

order to proceed from conviction to action, that is to say, to work.

The first crystallization of my thought can be found in The Lost Paradigm (1973). This

premature branch of Method, though nascent, tries hard to reformulate the concept of what is

human, that is to say, a human science or anthropology.

Sapir long ago highlighted that "it was absurd to say that the concept of man is at one

time individual, at another social" (and I would add: at still another biological). "That is like

saying that matter obeys alternately the laws of chemistry and those of atomic physics." (Sapir,

1927 in Sapir, 1971, p.36).3 The dissociation of the three terms individual/society/species breaks

their permanent and simultaneous relation. The fundamental problem, therefore, is to re-establish

and question what has disappeared in the dissociation: this very relation. It is, then, urgently

necessary not only to rearticulate individual with society (a task that at times has been

undertaken, but at the expense of flattening one of the two notions to benefit the other), but also

to effect the articulation reputed impossible (worse, "outmoded") between the biological and the

anthropo-social spheres.

That is what I attempted in The Lost Paradigm. I was obviously not seeking to reduce the

anthropological to the biological, nor trying to bring the "synthesis" of knowledge up to date. I

wanted to show that the empirical soldering that could be performed since 1960, via the ethology
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 93

of superior primates and the prehistory of hominids, between Animal and Human, Nature and

Culture, necessitated conceiving humans as a ternary concept:

[insert Fig 2 here]

in which one term cannot be reduced or subordinated to another. That, to my eyes, called for a

complex principle of explanation and a theory of self-organization.

Such a perspective poses new problems, still more fundamental and more radical from which

there is no escape:

- What does the radical "self" of self-organization mean?

- What is organization?

- What is complexity?

The first question reopens the whole issue of living organization; the second and third open a

chain of questions. They have drawn me along unknown paths.

Organization is an original concept if one thinks of its physical nature. It then introduces

a radical physical dimension in living organization and in anthropo-social organization that both

can and must be considered as developments transforming physical organization. At the same

time, the link between physics and biology can no longer be limited to chemistry, nor even to

thermodynamics. It must be organizational. From now on, it is necessary not only to articulate

the anthropo-social sphere, but it is also necessary to integrate them with the physical sphere:

[insert Fig 2a here]

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 94

But, in order to achieve such a double articulation, it would be necessary to combine knowledge

and abilities that are beyond our capacity. It is, then, too much to ask.

And yet, it would also not be enough, since it would not be a matter of conceiving

physical reality as primary stuff, an objective basis for all explanation.

We have known for more than half a century that neither micro-physical observation nor

macro-physical observation can be detached from their observer. The greatest progress in

contemporary science has been achieved by reintegrating the observer into the observation.

Which is logically necessary: every concept refers not only to the object that is conceived but

also to the conceiving subject. We return to the truth that the philosopher-bishop set forth two

centuries ago: "non-thought bodies.” don’t exist.4 Now, the observer who observes, the mind

that thinks and conceives, are inextricable from a culture, consequently from a society here and

now. All knowledge, even the most physical, undergoes a sociological determination. There is in

all science, even the most physical, an anthropo-social dimension. By that very fact, anthropo-

social reality projects itself and inscribes itself at the very heart of physical science.

All this is evident. But it is evidence that remains isolated, surrounded by a sanitary

cordon. No science has wanted to address the most objective category of knowledge: the

knowledge of the knowing subject. No natural science has wanted to know its cultural origin. No

physical science has wanted to recognize its human nature. The deep gap between the sciences of

nature and the human sciences masks both the physical reality of the latter and the social reality

of the former. We run smack into the omnipotence of a principle of disjunction: the human

sciences are condemned to extra-physical inconsistency and the natural sciences are condemned

to the unawareness of their social reality. As Von Foerster says very aptly: "The existence of
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 95

sciences called social indicates the refusal to allow other sciences to be social" (Von Foerster,

1974, p.28). (I would add: and to allow social sciences to be physical).

Now, all anthropo-social reality is based somehow (how?) on physical science, but all physical

science is based somehow (how?) on anthropo-social reality.

[insert Fig 2b here]

That given, we discover that the mutual implication among these terms loops itself in a circular

relationship which we must elucidate:

[insert Fig 3 here]

But, at the same time, we see that the elucidation of such a relation runs into a triple

impossibility:

1.The circuit

[insert Fig 4 here]

invades the entire field of knowledge and requires an impossible, encyclopedic amount of input.

2. The constitution of a relation where there had been disjunction poses a problem that is doubly

unfathomable: the problem of the origin and the nature of the principle that enjoins us to isolate

and separate in order to know added to the possibility of another principle capable of linking

what has been isolated and separated.

3. The circular character of the relation

[insert Fig 5 here]

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 96

takes the shape of a vicious circle, that is to say of a logical absurdity, since physical knowledge

depends on anthropo-sociological knowledge, which depends on physical knowledge, and so on,

infinitely. We now have not a launching pad but an infernal cycle.

Therefore, after this first lap around the track, we run into a triple wall: the wall of

encyclopedic knowledge, the wall of epistemology, and the wall of logical thought. In these

terms, the mission I believed I had assigned myself is impossible. I must give it up.

The School of Mourning

It is precisely this renunciation that the University teaches us. The school of Research is a school

of Mourning.

Upon every neophyte embarking on research there is imposed a major renunciation of

knowledge. We convince her that the era of the Picos de la Mirandola is three centuries back,

and that it is henceforth impossible to build one's vision both of humanity and of the world.

We prove to him that the growth in information and the heterogenization of knowledge

simply cannot be stored and manipulated by the human brain. We assure him that this is not to be

deplored but rather, in fact, it should be welcomed: He must, then, devote all his intelligence to

increasing specific, determined areas of knowledge. We integrate him in a specialized team, and

it is "specialized" and not "team" which is underscored. Henceforth a specialist, the researcher

sees himself offered the exclusive possession of a fragment of a puzzle the global vision of

which necessarily escapes each and everyone. He has now become a true scientific researcher

driven by this one ideal: knowledge is produced not to be articulated and thought, but to be

invested and utilized in an anonymous way.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 97

Fundamental questions are returned as general questions, namely vague, abstract, non-

operational. The original question that science snatched from religion and philosophy to take it

upon itself, the question which justifies its ambition as science –“What is humanity, what is the

world, what is humanity in the world?"—science today sends that question back to philosophy,

still incompetent in its eyes because of speculative drunkenness; science sends it back to religion,

still illusory in its eyes because of inveterate mythomania. Science abandons every fundamental

question to non-scholars, who are a priori disqualified. It only tolerates that, at the age of

retirement, its grand dignitaries take some meditative pose, which the young assistants in their

white lab coats and bent over their test tubes, will ridicule. It is not possible to integrate the

human sciences with the sciences of nature. It is not possible to have one’s knowledge

communicate with one’s life. Such is the main lesson passed-down from the College de France to

the "colleges" of France.

Is Mourning necessary? The Institution affirms it, proclaims it. It is thanks to the method

that isolates, separates, disjoints, reduces to units, and measures that science has discovered the

cell, the molecule, the particle, the galaxies, the quasars, the pulsars, gravity, electro-magnetism,

and quantum energy; that it has learned to interpret stones, sediments, fossils, bones, and

unknown scripts, including the script inscribed on DNA. However, the structures of this

knowledge are dissociated one from the other. Physics and biology communicate today only

through a few isthmuses. Physics no longer even manages to communicate with itself: the queen

of sciences is dissociated between micro-physics, macro-physics, and our meso-scale still

apparently subject to classical physics. The anthropological continent has drifted off, becoming

an Australia. In its breast, the triad constituting the concept of the human

[insert Fig 6 here]

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 98

is itself totally disjointed, as we have seen (Morin, 1973) and will see again. The human being

has come apart: there remains over here a tooling-hand, over there a talking-tongue, and

elsewhere sex organs splashing on a bit of brain. The idea of the human is all the more

dispensable because it is pitiful: the human being depicted by the human sciences is a supra-

physical and supra-biological specter. Like humanity, the world is dislocated among the

sciences, crumbling among the disciplines, pulverized into bits of information.

Today we cannot avoid the question: must the necessary analytical decomposition be paid

for by the decomposition of beings and things in a generalized atomization? Must the necessary

isolating of the object be paid for by disjunction and incommunicability between what is

separated? Must functional specialization be paid for by an absurd fragmentation? Must

knowledge be dislocated into a thousand stupid facts?

Now, what does this question mean, if not that science has to lose its veneration for

science and that science has to question science? Yet another issue that, apparently, adds to the

enormity of the problems that force us to give up. But it is precisely this issue that prevents us

from giving up on our problem.

How, in fact, can we surrender to the ukase of a science in which we have just discovered

a gigantic blind spot? Rather, should we think that this science suffers from insufficiency and

mutilation?

But then, what is science? Here, we must realize that this question does not have a

scientific answer: science does not know itself scientifically and has no means of knowing itself

scientifically. There is a scientific method to consider and control the objects of science. But
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 99

there is no scientific method to consider science as an object of science and still less the

scientific as subject of this object. There are epistemological tribunals which, a posteriori and

from the outside, pretend to judge and to gauge scientific theories. There are philosophical

tribunals where science is condemned by default. But there is no science of science. One can

even say that all scientific methodology, entirely given to the expulsion of the subject and of

reflexivity, maintains this self-occultation. "Science without conscience is nothing but ruination

of the soul," said Rabelais. The conscience that is missing here is not moral conscience, it is

conscience period, that is to say the aptitude to conceive itself. Hence these unbelievable

deficiencies: how is it that science remains incapable of seeing itself as social praxis? How is it

incapable, not only of controlling, but of conceiving its power of manipulation and its

manipulation by power? How is it that scientists are incapable of conceiving the connection

between "disinterested" research and the search for and of interest? Why are they so totally

incapable of examining in scientific terms the link between knowledge and power?

Henceforth, if we want to be logical with our plan, we must necessarily tackle the

problem of the science of science.

The Impossible Impossible

The mission becomes more and more impossible. But abdication has itself become even more

impossible. Can one be satisfied with conceiving the individual only by excluding society,

society only by excluding the species, the human only by excluding life, life only by excluding

physis, physics only by excluding life? Can one accept that local progress in precision is

accompanied by imprecision in the global forms and articulations? Can one accept that measure,

foresight and manipulation make meaning recede? Can one accept that information is

transformed into noise, that a downpour of micro-elucidations is transformed into generalized

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 100

obscurity? Can one accept that key questions be relegated to dungeons? Can one accept that

knowledge is founded on the exclusion of the knower, that thought is founded on the exclusion

of the thinker, that the subject is excluded from the construction of the object? That science is

totally unconscious of its social context and determination? Can we consider as normal and

evident that scientific knowledge has no subject and that its object is dislocated among the

sciences, crumbled among the disciplines? Can we accept such a night spreading over

knowledge?5

Can we continue to throw these questions into the trash? Can I know that asking them,

attempting to answer them, is inconceivable, ridiculous, even insane? But it is even more

inconceivable, ridiculous, and insane to throw them out.

The Non-Method
Let us understand each other: I am looking here neither for general knowledge nor for a theory of

everything. We must, on the contrary and on principle, refuse general knowledge. It always

conceals the difficulties of knowledge, that is to say the resistance that the real opposes to the

ideal. It is always abstract, poor, "ideological," always simplifying. Likewise, a theory of

everything, in order to avoid the disjunction between the separate branches of knowledge, obeys

an asphyxiating over-simplification, hanging the entire universe onto a single global formula.

Actually, the poverty of all unitarian attempts, of all global answers, confirms the scientific

discipline in its resignation to mourning. The choice, then, is not between a particular, precise,

limited knowledge and the general abstract idea. It is between Mourning and the search for a

method that might articulate what is separate and link what is disjointed.

It is certainly a matter here of a method, in the Cartesian sense, which would permit

"rightly conducting reason and seeking truth in the sciences." But Descartes could, in his first
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 101

discourse, at the same time exercise doubt, exorcise doubt, establish preliminary certitudes and

have Method spring up like Minerva armed from head to toe. The Cartesian doubt was sure of

itself. Our doubt doubts itself. It discovers the impossibility of starting from scratch, since the

logical, linguistic, cultural conditions of thought are inescapably present in our a priori

judgments. And this doubt, which cannot be absolute, can no longer be absolutely resolved.

This "French knight" set out at too fast a pace. Today, we can set out only in uncertainty,

including uncertainty regarding our doubt. Today we should methodically doubt the very

principle of the Cartesian method, the disjunction of objects among themselves, of notions

among themselves (clear and distinct ideas), the absolute disjunction of object and subject.

Today, our historical need is to find a method that detects rather than hides links, articulations,

solidarities, implications, imbrications, interdependencies, complexities.

We must start by extinguishing false clarity. Setting out not from the clear and distinct,

but from the obscure and uncertain; no longer from assured knowledge but from the critique of

assurance.

We can set out only in ignorance, uncertainty and confusion. But it is a matter of

achieving a new consciousness of ignorance, uncertainty and confusion. We have become aware,

not of human ignorance in general, but of the ignorance that is crouching, buried deep, almost in

nuclear fashion, at the heart of our knowledge reputed to be the most certain, scientific

knowledge. We know from now on that this knowledge is poorly known and poorly knowing,

fragmented, and ignorant of its own unknown as well as of its known. Uncertainty becomes a

viaticum. Doubting our doubt gives doubt a new dimension, the dimension of reflexivity. The

doubt by which the subject questions the conditions of emergence of its own thought from now

on constitutes a potentially relativist, relational, and self-knowing thought. Finally, the

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 102

acceptance of confusion can become a means of resisting mutilating simplification. Certainly, as

we set out we are without a method. But at least we can use an anti-method, where ignorance,

uncertainty, and confusion become virtues.

We can trust these discards of classical science all the more now that they have become

the pioneers of the new sciences. The upsurge of the non-simplifiable, the uncertain, the

confused, by which the crisis of science in the twentieth century manifests itself, is at the same

time inseparable from the new developments of this science. What seems like regression from

the point of view of disjunction, simplification, reduction, and certainty (thermodynamic

disorder, micro-physical uncertainty, the random character of genetic mutations), is on the

contrary inseparable from progression into unknown lands. More fundamentally, disjunction and

simplification are already dead at the very base of physical reality. The subatomic particle has

surged up irremediably, in confusion, uncertainty, and disorder. Whatever the future

developments of micro-physics may be, we will never return to the element that is at once

simple, isolatable, and indivisible. Of course, confusion and uncertainty are not and will not be

considered here as the ultimate words of knowledge: they are the pioneering signs of complexity.

Science evolves. Whitehead already noted fifty years ago that science "changes even

more than theology.” (Whitehead, 1926, in Whitehead, 1932, p.233) To repeat Bronowski's

formula, the concept of science is neither absolute nor eternal. And yet at the heart of the

scientific institution reigns the most anti-scientific of illusions: holding as absolute and eternal

the characteristics of science that are the most dependent on the techno-bureaucratic organization

of society.

Therefore, no matter how marginal it may be, my attempt does not loom like a meteorite

from another sky. It comes from the convulsions of our own scientific soil. It is born from the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 103

crisis of science, and it feeds on its revolutionizing progress. In any case, it is because official

certainty has become uncertain that official intimidation can let itself be intimidated in turn. For

sure, my effort will give rise at first to misunderstanding. The word science includes a fossilized

meaning, admittedly, and the new meaning has not yet disengaged itself. This effort will seem

laughable and insane because the disjunction has not yet been contested in its principle. But it

will be able to become conceivable, reasonable, and necessary in the light of a new principle that

it will perhaps have contributed to institute, precisely because it will not have been afraid to

appear laughable and insane.

From Vicious Circle to Virtuous Cycle

I have indicated the major impossibilities that condemn my undertaking:

- The logical impossibility (vicious circle),

- The impossibility of encyclopedic knowledge,

- The all-powerful presence of the law of disjunction and the absence of a law for the

organization of knowledge.

These impossibilities are interwoven, and their conjunction results in this enormous absurdity: a

vicious circle of encyclopedic amplitude, which has neither a principle nor a method of

organization.

Let us take the circular relationship:

[Insert Fig 7 here]

This circular relationship signifies first of all that a human science is postulating a science

of nature that in turn postulates a human science. Now, logically this relationship of mutual

dependence returns each of these propositions back alternatively to each other in an infernal
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 104

cycle where neither can take shape. This circular relationship signifies also that anthropo-social

reality depends on physical reality, and physical reality depends on anthropo-social reality all at

the same time. Taken literally, these two propositions are antinomous and cancel each other out.

Finally, in considering the double circular proposition (anthropo-social reality depends on

anthropo-social reality) from a different angle, we observe that an uncertainty will remain no

matter what happens to the very nature of reality, which loses all primary ontological foundation,

and this uncertainty leads to the impossibility of a truly objective knowledge.

We understand then that the ties between antinomous propositions in mutual dependence

stand denounced as vicious, both in their principle and in their consequences (the loss of the base

of objectivity). Therefore, we have always broken the vicious circle either by isolating the

propositions or by choosing one of the terms as a simple principle to which we must refer the

others. Therefore, in what concerns the relationship between physics, biology, and anthropology,

each of these terms was isolated, and the only link conceivable was the reduction of biology to

physics, of anthropology to biology. The knowledge that binds a mind and an object is therefore

referred to the physical object (empiricism) or to the human mind (idealism) or to social reality

(sociologism). Thus, the relationship between subject and object is dissociated, science making

off with the object, philosophy with the subject.

This very fact means that breaking the circularity, eliminating the antinomies, is precisely

to fall back under the empire of the law of disjunction/simplification from which we want to

escape. On the other hand, preserving the circularity is to refuse to reduce a complex datum to a

mutilating principle; it is to refuse the hypostasis of a master concept (Matter, Mind, Energy,

Information, Class Struggle, etc.). It is to refuse linear discourse with points of departure and

arrival. It is to refuse abstract simplification. Breaking the circularity seems to reestablish the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 105

possibility of an absolutely objective knowledge. But that is illusory. Preserving circularity is, on

the contrary, to respect the objective conditions of human knowledge, which always, somewhere,

includes logical paradox and uncertainty.

Preserving circularity, by maintaining the association of the two propositions, both

independently recognized as true but which negate each other as soon as they come into contact,

is to open the possibility of conceiving these truths as the two faces of one complex truth. It is to

unveil the principal reality, which is the relation of interdependence, between notions which

disjunction isolates or opposes. It is, therefore, to open the door to searching for this relation.

Preserving circularity is, perhaps, by that very fact, to open the possibility of knowledge

reflecting on itself: in fact, the circularity

[Insert figure 8 here]

must bring the physicist to reflect on the cultural and social characteristics of her science, to

reflect on her own mind, and to lead her to question herself. As the Cartesian cogito indicates,

the subject arises in and by the reflexive movement of thought on thought.6

To conceive circularity is to open up the possibility of a method. Through the processes

and exchanges of having the terms interact, this method would produce a complex knowledge

containing its own reflexivity.

In this way, we see our hope rise up from the very things that caused the despair of

simplifying thought: paradox, antinomy, and vicious circles. We glimpse the possibility of

transforming vicious circles into virtuous cycles, becoming reflexive and generative of complex

thought. Here we see this idea that will guide our departure; it is not necessary to break our

circularities. On the contrary, we must take care not to detach ourselves from them. The circle

will be our wheel; our path will be a spiral.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 106

The En-cyclo-pedia
All at once, the insurmountable problem of encyclopedism is transformed, since the terms of the

problem have changed. The term encyclopedia must no longer be taken in the cumulative and

stupid alphabetical meaning where it has lost all value. It must be taken in its original meaning of

egkuklios paidea –training that circulates knowledge. It is, in fact, a matter of en-cyclo-peding,

that is to say, of learning to articulate the disjointed points of view of knowledge into an active

cycle.

This en-cyclo-pedism does not pretend to encompass all knowledge. That would be to fall

back into the cumulative idea as well as to head into the totalitarian mania of the great unitarian

systems which enclose the real in a great corset of order and coherence (and evidently let it burst

out). I know the meaning of Adorno’s statement: "Totality is non-truth." Every system that aims

at enclosing the world in its logic is an insane rationalization.

The en-cyclo-pedism required here aims at articulating what is fundamentally disjoined

and should be fundamentally joined. Our effort, then, will not be directed at the totality of

knowledge in each sphere, but on crucial knowledge, strategic points, knots of communication,

organizational articulation between disjointed spheres. In this sense, the idea of organization, as

it develops, is going to constitute something like the “bough of Salzburg”7 around which key

scientific concepts will be able to cluster and crystallize.

The theoretical bet I am making in this work is that knowledge of what organization is

could be transformed into an organizing principle of knowledge itself that can articulate the

disjointed and complexify the simplified. The scientific risks I run are evident. These are not so

much errors of information, since I have appealed to the critical collaboration of researchers

competent in domains that were foreign to me just seven years ago. They are rather fundamental
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 107

errors in detecting the crucial and strategic problems. The umbrella of scientificity that covers

me does not immunize me. My path, like all paths, is threatened by error, and, moreover, I am

going to cover terrain where I will be exposed. But, above all, my path will risk ceaselessly

straying between esotericism and popularization, philosophism and scientism.

Therefore, I am not escaping the encyclopedic difficulty, but this difficulty ceases to be

stated in terms of accumulation, in terms of a system, in terms of totality. It is stated in terms of

organization and of articulation at the heart of an active circular process or cycle.

To Relearn Learning
Everything holds together: the transformations of a vicious circle into a productive circuit, the

impossible encyclopedia into circling movement, are inseparable from the constitution of an

organizing principle of knowledge that associates the description of the object with the

description of the description (and the deciphering of the decipherer) and which gives as much

force to articulation and integration as to distinction and opposition. (Because we must not seek

to suppress the distinctions and oppositions, but rather, to overthrow the dictatorship of

disjunctive and stifling simplifications.)

By that very fact, we will be able to approach the problem of the first principles of

opposition, distinction, relation, association in discourses, theories, thoughts: namely, the

problem of paradigms.

Revolutions of thought are always the fruit of a generalized shock, of a whirling

movement that goes from the phenomenal experience to paradigms that organize this experience.

Thus, shifting from the Ptolemaic paradigm to the Copernican paradigm–which, by means of an

earth/sun permutation, changed the world by pushing the Earth from the center to the periphery,

from sovereign to satellite—required countless shifts between observations disrupting the ancient
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 108

system of explanation, theoretical efforts to amend the explanatory system, and the idea of

changing the very principle of explanation. At the end of this process, the initially scandalous

and insane idea became normal and evident, since the impossible found its solution according to

a new law and in a new system of organization of the phenomenal data. The articulation

[Insert figure 9a] and the articulation [insert figure 9b], which question a paradigm

much more fundamental than the Copernican law, work simultaneously on the terrain of

phenomenal data, theoretical ideas, and the fundamental laws of reasoning. The battle will be

fought on all fronts, but the master position is the one that regulates the logic of reasoning.

In science, and especially in politics, ideas, often more stubborn than facts, resist the

outpouring of data and proof. Facts can actually shatter when they come up against ideas, as long

as nothing exists that can re-organize experience differently. In every moment of our

experience—while eating, walking, loving or thinking—all that we do is simultaneously

biological, psychological, and social. Nevertheless, anthropology has been able, for the last half-

century, to pedantically proclaim the absolute disjunction between the human (biological) and

human (social) realms. More profoundly still, classical science has been able, to this very day

and contrary to all evidence, to be assured that it was of no consequence whatsoever and of no

cognitive significance whatsoever that every physical body or object is actually conceived by the

human mind. It is not a matter here of contesting "objective" knowledge. Its good deeds have

been and remain inestimable since the absolute primacy granted the concordance of observations

and experience remains the decisive means of eliminating the arbitrary and the judgment of

authority. It is not a matter of preserving that objectivity absolutely, but of integrating it into a

more ample and reflective knowledge, giving it a third eye capable of detecting its own blind

spots.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 109

Our thought must lay siege to the unthought that commands and controls it. We use our

structure of thought to think. It will also be necessary to use our thought to rethink our structure

of thought. Our thought must return to its source in a questioning and critical loop. Otherwise,

the dead structure will continue to secrete petrifying thoughts.

I have discovered how useless it is to argue only against error. The latter is reborn

ceaselessly from laws of thought which themselves are situated beyond critical awareness. I have

understood how useless it was to prove things only at the level of phenomena. The message is

soon reabsorbed by mechanisms of forgetfulness that stem from the self-defense of the

threatened system of ideas. I have understood that it was hopeless to only refute. Only a new

foundation can make the old crumble. This is why I think the crucial problem is the organizing

principle of knowledge and, what is vital today is not only to learn, not only to relearn, not only

to unlearn, but to reorganize our mental system to relearn learning.

"Caminante no hay camino"

That which teaches us to learn how to learn, that is method. I am not bringing the method. I am

starting out on the search for the method. I am not starting out with a method. I am starting out

fully aware of my refusal to simplify. Simplification is the disjunction between entities that are

separate and closed, the reduction to a simple element, the expulsion of what does not enter into

the linear scheme. I am starting out with the will not to give in to these fundamental modes of

thought which simplify:

-To idealize (to believe that reality can be reabsorbed in the idea, that the intelligible alone is

real);
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 110

-To rationalize (to want to enclose reality in the order and coherence of a system, to forbid it

from overflowing outside the system, to need to justify the existence of the world by conferring

on it a patent of rationality);

-To normalize (that is to say to eliminate the strange, the irreducible, the mysterious).

I am starting out also in need of a principle of knowledge that not only respects but

recognizes the non-idealizable, the non-rationalizable, the non-normal, the enormous. We need a

principle of knowledge that not only respects, but reveals the mystery of things.

At the beginning, the word method signified advancing along a path. Here we must resign

to advance without a path, to trailblaze. As Machado said: Caminante no hay camino, se hace

camino al andar. Method can be formed only during research. It can be disengaged and

formulated only afterwards, at the moment when the term once again becomes the point of

departure, this time endowed with method. Nietzsche realized that: "Methods come at the end."

(The Antichrist).

A return to the beginning is not a vicious circle, if the voyage, as the word trip is used

today, means an experience from which we come back changed. Then, perhaps, we will have

been able to learn by learning. The circle will have been able to transform itself into a spiral

where the return to the beginning is precisely what distances us from the beginning. That is

clearly what novels about initiation, from Wilhelm Meister to Siddharta, have told us.

The Spiral Inspiration

The reader is, I hope, starting perhaps to sense the following: Though this work does not put any

limit on its perspective, though it does not exclude any dimension of reality, though it has the

most extreme ambition, it cannot because of its very ambition be conceived as an encyclopedia,

in the sense that this means a balance sheet of knowledge. But it can be conceived as an
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 111

encyclopedia in the sense that the term, returning to its origin, signifies a circling of knowledge.

It cannot in any way be conceived as a general unified theory whose diverse aspects in the

different domains are logically deduced from the master principle. The break with simplification

makes me reject in its very principle every unitary theory, every totalizing synthesis, every

rationalizing/ordering system. This, already stated, must unfortunately be repeated because

minds which live under the empire of the principle of simplification see only the alternative

between fragmented research on the one hand, and the general idea on the other.

It is this type of alternative we have to rid ourselves of, and it is not simple; otherwise,

there would have been, a long time ago, an answer to this problem within the framework of this

law of simplification. It is not a question, finally, of improvising a new science, launched on the

market ready made to replace the obsolete science. If I have spoken elsewhere (Morin, 1973) of

scienza nuova, I am referring to the perspective, the horizon: it cannot be the point of departure.

If there is a new science, antagonistic to the old science, it is bound to it by a common trunk, it

doesn't come from somewhere else, it will be able to be differentiated only by metamorphosis

and revolution. The book is a slowly advancing spiral.8 It is starting out from inquiring and

questioning. It is pursued through a series of linked conceptual and theoretical reorganizations

which, attaining at last the epistemological and paradigmatic level, arrive at the idea of a method

that must allow an advance of thought and action capable of reassembling what was mutilated,

integrating what was disjointed, and thinking what was hidden.

The concept of method here is opposed to the conception called "methodological", where

method is reduced to technical recipes. Like the Cartesian method, it must be inspired by a

fundamental principle or paradigm. But the difference here is precisely one of paradigm. It is no

longer a matter of obeying a principle of order (excluding disorder), of clarity (excluding

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 112

obscurity), of distinction (excluding adherences, participations and communications), of

disjunction (excluding subject, antinomy, complexity), that is to say a principle which ties

science to logical simplification. On the contrary, starting from a principle of complexity, it is a

matter of linking what was disjointed. "To start a revolution everywhere” Sainte-Beuve used to

say of the Cartesian method. That is because Descartes had formulated the grand paradigm that

was going to dominate the West: the disjunction of subject and object, of spirit and matter, the

opposition of man and nature. If, starting from a paradigm of complexity, a new method can be

born, be embodied, advance, and progress, then it would, perhaps, be able "'to start a revolution

everywhere," even in the notion of revolution that has become flat, conformist and reactionary.

The Spirit of the Valley

This book takes off from the crisis of our century, and it is to this crisis that it returns. The

radicalness of the crisis of society, the radicalness of the crisis of humanity pushed me to look at

the root level of theory. I know that humanity needs a political theory. I also know that this

political theory needs to rest on anthropo-sociology. That anthropo-sociology needs to be

articulated on a science of nature, and this articulation requires an interlinked reorganization of

the structure of knowledge. I had to plunge into this fundamental problem by turning away from

the solicitation of the present. But the present is this very crisis that reaches me, disperses me,

and goes right through me. The proper object-subject of this book returns unceasingly to my

work to undermine it. The noises of the world, armaments, conflicts, ephemeral and destructive

liberations, and lasting and hard oppressions come through the walls and strike at my heart. I am

working in the midst of these olive trees, of these vines, in these hills, near the ocean, while a

new midnight advances on the world; its order crushes; its violence inspires respect, terror and

admiration to those around me, who, because of my silence, think I am one of them. I turn aside
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 113

from the call of those for whom I must testify, and, at the same time, I give in to the invitation of

a bottle of wine, a friendly smile, a loving face...

Why speak of me? Is it not decent, normal, serious that, when dealing with science,

knowledge, thought, the author be effaced behind his work, and evaporate in a discourse that

must become impersonal? We have to know, on the contrary, that it is there that comedy

triumphs. The subject who disappears from his discourse in fact takes over the Control Tower.

By pretending to give way to the Copernican sun, he reconstitutes a Ptolemaic system whose

center is his spirit.

Now, my effort to find method tends precisely to tear me away from this absolute self-

centeredness by which the subject, while disappearing on tip-toe, is identified with sovereign

Objectivity. It is not anonymous Science that is expressed by my lips. I am not talking from the

height of a throne of Assurance. On the contrary, my conviction secretes an infinite uncertainty. I

know that to believe oneself to be possessing or possessed by the Truth is already to be

intoxicated, it is to hide oneself from one's weaknesses and deficiencies. In the kingdom of the

intellect, it is the unconscious that believes itself to be fully conscious.

I know that no indubitable sign will confirm or disconfirm my work. My marginality

proves nothing, not even to myself. The precursor, as Canguilhem says, is the one of whom we

know only afterwards that he came before. In anomie and deviance, the avant-garde is mixed

with all the low forms of delirium... The judgment of others will not be any more decisive. If my

conception is fruitful, it can be as despised or misunderstood as applauded or recognized. The

solitude to which I constrain myself is the lot of the pioneer, but also of those who stray. I have

lost contact with those who have not undertaken the same voyage, and I do not yet see my

companions who exist, no doubt, and who also do not see me... Finally, I am working as if at an
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 114

absolute, doing a relative and uncertain work... But I know more and more that the only

worthwhile knowledge is that which feeds on uncertainty and that the only living thought is that

which maintains itself at the temperature of its own destruction.

It is not certainty or assurance but need that has driven me to undertake this work, day

after day, for years. I have felt myself possessed by the same evident necessity of trans-

substantiation as that by which the spider secretes its thread and weaves its web. I have felt

myself plugged into the planetary patrimony, animated by the religion of that which bonds, the

rejection of that which rejects, and infinite solidarity; what the Tao calls the Spirit of the Valley

which "receives all the waters that flow into it."

Notes
1. Excerpted from Morin’s Method: Toward a Study of Humankind; The Nature of Nature.

Belanger, Roland, trans. American University Studies (Series V, Philosophy, Vol. 1.).

2. I have already stated them (Morin, 1973, p. I 1-14).

3. All indication between parentheses of an author's name followed by a date, refers to the work

listed in the bibliography at the end of this volume, in alphabetical order, with mention of the

dale of the edition to which the note refers. The original edition is indicated only when it is

necessary to underline the innovative or historical character of the ideas included in the work

cited.

4. "The mind, not attentive to itself, imagines and thinks that it can conceive effectively existing

bodies non-thought or out of mind, although at the same time they are grasped and exist in

him." (Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge, Section 23).

5. I go further. Can one so easily disjoint one's science from one's life? Can one consider

himself at one time (scientifically) as a determined object and at another time (existentially,
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 115

ethically) as a sovereign subject? Can one skip several times per day from the objective

religion founded on determinism to a humanistic religion of the Self, of conscience, of

responsibility; then, if necessary, to official Religion where the World finds a creator and

man, a father and savior? Can one be satisfied with passing from "serious" science to some

miserable philosophical rationalizations, then to political hysteria, and from there to a private

pulsional life?

6. In so far as the method of Descartes is disjunctive, thus far the irrefutable evidence of the

cogito constitutes the transformation of the apparently vicious circle into productive

circularity. The "vicious" circle is the [Insert figure 9c] where thought turns in circles by

reflecting itself ad infinitum. Now, in fact, reclosing the circle, instead of locking thought up

in a vacuum, causes the self-reference to rise up clearly, that is to say, the being-subject or

Ego [Insert figure 9d] And by that very fact the cogito is transformed into irrefutable

affirmation of existence: [Insert figure 9e].

7. “At the salt mines of Hallein near Salzburg the miners throw a leafless wintry bough into one

of the abandoned workings. Two or three months later, through the effect of waters saturated

with salt which soak the bough and then let it dry as they recede, the miners find it covered

with a shiny deposit of crystals.” —Stendhal, On Love, 1822 – AHC

8. All references to “this book” refer to Morin, E. Method: Toward a Study of Humankind; The

Nature of Nature. Belanger, Roland, trans. American University Studies (Series V,

Philosophy, Vol. 1.), from which this is excerpted. – AHC

References
Berkeley, G. (1969). Principles of human knowledge. London, 1770. French translation,

Principes de la connaissance humaine. Paris: Aubier.

Morin, E. (1973). Le paradigme perdu. (Paradigm Lost). Paris: Le Seuil.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 116

Sapir, E. (1927). Selected writings of Edward Sapir in language, culture, and personality. Ed.

David Mandelbraun. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Nietzsche, F. (2016). The antichrist. Friederich Nietzsche.

Whitehead. A.N. (1926). Science and the modern world. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 117

Chapter 3: Restricted Complexity, General

Complexity1
Translation by Carlos Gershenson with revisions by Amy Heath-Carpentier

Before Gaston Bachelard evoked the ideal of complexity in contemporary science in 1934,

neither science nor philosophy showed a particular interest in complexity as such. The

contribution of great philosophers is a contribution to our understanding of the complexity of our

universe, even if this contribution took the form of a reductionist system, obscuring rather than

revealing this complexity. But at the same time, the classical science of the last four centuries,

wanting to detach itself from philosophy deliberately avoided or rejected the idea of complexity.

Rejection or fear of an ideal of thought that we must now try to understand.

1. 'Classical science' rejected complexity based on three

principles.
Classical science rejected complexity based upon three fundamental, explanatory principles:

1. The principle of universal, scientific determinism, illustrated by Laplace's daemon, who, by

virtue of his intelligence and extremely developed senses, was capable not only of knowing

all past events, but also of predicting all future events.

2. The principle of reduction, which claims that we can know any whole solely by knowing the

nature of its basic constituent parts.

3. The principle of disjunction, which posits the isolation and separation of questions from one

another, leading to the separation of disciplines, which then in turn become closed off from

each other.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 118

These principles led to extremely brilliant, significant, and positive developments within

scientific knowledge. However, these developments ceased when they became reified within

science and more important than what they contributed.

This scientific conception absolutely rejects the notion of "complexity." On the one hand,

complexity usually implies confusion and uncertainty. The expression "it is complex" expresses

a difficulty in providing a definition or explanation of a phenomenon. On the other hand, since

classical science requires that truth be expressed by simple laws and concepts, complexity must

relate only to appearances that are superficial or illusory. Phenomena appear to arise in a

confused and dubious manner, but the mission of science is to seek out, behind the appearances,

the hidden order inherent in the universe.

Certainly, Western science is not alone in the search for the "true" reality behind

appearances. In Hinduism, the world is veiled appearances, Maya. In Buddhism, Samsara, the

world of phenomena, is not the ultimate reality. True reality, both in the Hinduism and

Buddhism, is inexpressible and, at times, unknowable. Conversely, in classical science, there is

always the impeccable and implacable order of nature behind appearances.

As a result, complexity is invisible in the way disciplinary fragmentation divided reality.

In fact, the first meaning of the word complexity derives from the Latin complexus, which means

what is woven together. The primary trait, not of the discipline in itself, but by which the

discipline is conceived as distinctive, within its own silo, naturally collapses complexity.

For all these reasons, complexity has been invisible or deemed illusory and has been

deliberately shunned.

2. The first breach leading to complexity: irreversibility

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 119

Complexity was addressed first within the scientific community during the nineteenth century. In

fact, it was recognized there prior to being recognized on its own merits.

Complexity appeared with the second law of thermodynamics, which demonstrates that

energy degrades into heat over time. This principle of entropy is within linear time. Until then

the physical laws were in principle reversible. Even in the conception of life, species were fixed

and did not require time.

The important point here is not only the emergence of linear time and irreversibility, but

also the appearance of disorder, since heat is conceived as the agitation of molecules. The

disordered movement of each molecule is unpredictable except on a statistical scale where

distribution laws can be determined effectively.

The law of the irreversible growth of entropy sparked multiple theories and, beyond the

study of closed systems, a first reflection about the universe, where the second law leads the

universe toward dispersion, uniformity, and finally toward death. Previously rejected, this notion

of the death of the universe appeared recently in cosmology with the discovery of dark energy.

Dark energy could lead to the dispersion of galaxies and may predict that the universe tends to a

generalized dispersion. As the poet Eliot said: "the universe will end not with a bang but a

whimper"...

The acceptance of disorder, dispersion and disintegration dealt a fatal blow to the perfect,

ordered, and determinist vision of the universe put forth by traditional science.

Many strategies will be required to succeed in altering the dominant paradigm and to

understand that the principle of dispersion, which began at the birth of the universe with this

incredible conflagration improperly named “the Big Bang,” because this, in turn, is linked with a
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 120

contrary principle of bonding and organization, which manifests in the creation of nuclei, atoms,

galaxies, stars, molecules, and life.

3. Interactions: Order/disorder/organization
How is it that the phenomena of order and disorder are related?

This is what I tried to explain in the first volume of La Méthode (Method). We need to

associate the antagonistic principles of order and disorder and to associate them in such a way

that another principle emerges: organization.

Here is, in fact, a complex vision, which was rejected for a very long time, because it was

inconceivable that disorder could be compatible with order and that organization could be related

to disorder at all, being so diametrically opposed to it.

Concurrently with the ideas of the universe, the conception of the relentless order of life

was also altered. Lamarck introduced the idea of evolution. Darwin proposed variation and

competition as the engines of evolution. Even in certain cases where post-Darwinism weakened

the radical character of the conflict, it has contributed yet another nemesis of order: chance. I

even would say excessive chance. Within the Neo-Darwinism, scholars avoided designating the

new forms of living organization such as wings a "creation" or "invention". Scholars were very

afraid of the word "invention" and of the word “creation” so they devised “chance” instead.

One can understand the fear of creation because science rejects creationism, that is, the

idea that God is the creator of living forms. However, the rejection of creationism masked the

creativity expressed in the history of life and humanity. From the philosophical point of view, it

was only a short while ago that Bergson first and Castoriadis later–in a rather different way--

centered their theories on creation.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 121

In addition, at the beginning of the twentieth century, microphysics introduced a

fundamental uncertainty in the universe of particles that ceased to obey the conceptions of space

and time characteristic of our so called macro-physical universe. How can these two universes

that are also one and the same, but at different scales, be compatible? Today, it is possible to

claim that we could pass from the microphysical universe to our own since between them a

certain number of quantum elements are connected due to a process called decoherence.

However, there still remains this formidable logical and conceptual hiatus between the two

physics.

Finally, on a grand mega-physical scale, Einstein's theory reveals that space and time are

interrelated, with the result that our lived and perceived reality becomes only meso-physical,

situated between micro and mega-physical reality.

4. Chaos
All this affected the dogmas of classical science. And yet, in reality, although they became

increasingly mummified, they remain. However, a certain number of foreign terms began to

appear. For example, the term "catastrophe", suggested by René Thom to try to understand

discontinuous changes of form. Then came Mandelbrot’s fractals. And then the physical theories

of chaos that, to complicate matters further, became generalized. Today we believe that the solar

system –that same solar system that seems to obey an impeccable, measurable, and precise

order—when considered in terms of its evolution over millions of years—is a chaotic system

comprising a dynamic instability that modifies, for example, Earth's rotation or orbit around the

Sun. A chaotic process may obey deterministic initial states, but these states cannot be known

completely, and the interactions generated within this process can alter any prediction.

Negligible variations have considerable consequences over vast periods of time. In this physics,
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 122

the word chaos has a strictly limited meaning related to apparent disorder and unpredictability.

Determinism is saved in principle, but it is worthless, since one cannot know the initial states

completely. In fact, we are, since the original explosion and forevermore, plunged in a chaotic

universe.

5. The emergence of complexity

Nevertheless, complexity remains unknown in physics, biology and the human sciences. It is

certainly the case that, after more than half a century, the word complexity broke through, but in

a domain that also remained impermeable both to the human and social sciences, and to the

natural sciences as well. In the forties and fifties, the idea of complexity was at the heart of a sort

of spiral nebula of mathematicians and engineers connected with what we know call Information

Theory, Cybernetics, and General System Theory which emerged more or less at the same time.

Within this nebula, complexity appears with Warren Weaver and Ross Ashby to help to define

the degree of variability in a given system. The word appeared, but did not gain momentum,

since the new thinking remained mostly confined to these communities. The contributions of

Von Neumann and Von Foerster remain largely ignored within the preserve of distinct,

disciplinary sciences. It is also the case that Chaitin’s definition of randomness as algorithmic

incompressibility becomes applicable to complexity. Consequently, the terms chance, disorder

and complexity tend to overlap and can sometimes be confused.

There were cracks, but still no breach.

An opening came at the Santa Fe Institute (1984) where the term “complex systems” was

essential to defining dynamic systems with a vast quantity of interactions and feedback within

which occur processes that are very difficult to predict and control and where classical scientific

concepts become useless.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 123

The dogmas or paradigms of classical science began to be disputed.

The notion of emergence appeared. In "Chance and Necessity", Jacques Monod

undertook a major study of emergence defined as the qualities and properties that appear once

the organization of a living system is established, qualities that evidently did not exist when the

parts existed in isolation. Emergence reappears, increasingly, here and there, but as a simple

statement without being really being questioned, even though it is a conceptual supernova.

We now arrive at the type of complexity I call "restricted.” The word complexity is

introduced in "complex systems theory." In addition, here and there the idea of "sciences of

complexity" was introduced, encompassing the ideas of fractals and chaos theory.

Restricted complexity spread rather recently, and, after a decade in France, many barriers

have been overcome. Why? Because, whenever the ideas of chaos, fractals, disorder, and

uncertainty appeared, the theoretical vacuum became increasingly evident, and it became

necessary to apply complexity to them all. Only, this understanding of complexity is restricted to

complex systems, because empirically they involve a multiplicity of interrelated processes,

interdependent and retroactively associated. In fact, complexity is never questioned nor

contemplated epistemologically.

The epistemological division between restricted and generalized complexity appears

because I think that any system, whatever it might be, is (or can be understood as) complex by its

very nature.

Restricted complexity has made potentially important advances in formalization, and in

the possibilities of modeling, which themselves favor interdisciplinary potentialities. But we

remain within the epistemology of classical science. When we search for the "laws of

complexity", we still attach complexity as a kind of boxcar behind the real locomotive, the one
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 124

that produces the laws. A hybrid was formed between the principles of traditional science and the

advances towards which it was moving. In fact, in the process, we avoid the fundamental

problems of complexity which are epistemological, cognitive, and paradigmatic. To an extent,

we recognize complexity, but only by decomplexifying it. In this way, the breach is opened, but

we try to plaster it over: the paradigm of classical science remains, only fissured.

6. Generalized complexity
But what, then, is "generalized" complexity? To grasp it requires, I repeat, an epistemological

rethinking, bearing on the organization of knowledge itself. And it is a paradigmatic problem in

the sense that I have defined “paradigm.”2 Since a paradigm of simplification controls classical

science by imposing the principles of reduction and disjunction on knowledge, there should be a

paradigm of complexity, imposing the principles of distinction and conjunction.

In opposition to reduction, complexity requires that we to try to comprehend the relations

between the whole and the parts. Knowledge of the parts is not enough, and knowledge of the

whole as a whole is not enough, if one ignores its parts. Rather, one is compelled to loop back

and forth to garner the knowledge of both the whole and its parts. The principle of reduction is

substituted by a principle that conceptualizes the whole/parts relationship.

The principle of disjunction, of separation (between objects, between disciplines,

between theories, between the subject and the object of knowledge), should be substituted with

another principle that maintains distinction, but seeks to establish relationship.

The principle of generalized determinism should be replaced by a principle that conceives

of the relationship between order, disorder, and organization. Accepting, of course, that order

does not mean only laws, but also stabilities, regularities, organizing cycles and that disorder is

more than dispersion and disintegration. Disorder can also be blockage, collisions, irregularities.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 125

th
Returning to Weaver’s words from his 1948 text to which we often refer: the XIX
th
century was the century of disorganized complexity and the XX century must be that of

organized complexity.3

When he said "disorganized complexity", he was thinking of the irruption of the second

law of thermodynamics and its consequences. Organized complexity means to our eyes that

systems are themselves complex, because their organization supposes, comprises, or produces

complexity.

Consequently, a major issue we have to face is the inseparable relationship (shown in La

Méthode 1)4 between disorganized complexity and organized complexity.

Now, let us examine three notions that are present, but, in my opinion, not articulated

explicitly, in restricted complexity: system, emergence, and organization.

7. System: "All systems should be viewed as complex”

What is a system? It is a relationship between parts, which can be very different from each other

and which constitute a whole that is simultaneously organized, organizing, and organizer.

We are all familiar with the dictum that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,

because all of the qualities or properties of the parts are insufficient to explain or understand the

whole. New qualities or properties appear due to the organization of these parts in a whole: they

are emergent.

But there is also an element of subtraction that I want to highlight. The whole is not only

more than the sum of its parts, but it is also less than the sum of its parts.

Why? Because a certain number of qualities and properties present in the parts can be

inhibited by the organization of the whole. Even when each of our cells contains the total of our
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 126

genetic inheritance, only a small part of that heritage is active, and the rest is inhibited. In the

relationship between an individual and her society, the liberties (even those extreme liberties that

are considered delinquent or criminal) inherent to each individual may be inhibited by the police,

laws, and social order.

Consequently, as Pascal said, we should conceive a circular relationship: one cannot

know the parts without knowing the whole, but one cannot know the whole without knowing the

parts.

The principle of organization, therefore, becomes critical, since it is through organization

of the parts in a whole that emergent qualities appear and inhibited qualities disappear.5

8. The emergence of emergence

What is critical to understanding emergence is that it cannot be deduced from the qualities of the

parts and is therefore irreducible. It appears only in the organization of the whole. This

complexity is present in any system, starting with the water molecule, which has qualities or

properties that isolated hydrogen or oxygen do not possess, and they in turn have qualities that

the water molecule does not have.

There is a recent issue of Science et Avenir6 devoted to emergence. Instead of linking

emergence and organization, speculation focuses on whether emergence might be a hidden,

intrinsic force in nature.

From the discovery of the structure of the genetic inheritance in DNA, it appeared that

life consisted of physicochemical properties present in the material world and clearly not a “life”

ingredient or élan vital in the Bergsonian sense. Instead, there was only the physicochemical

matter that, with a certain degree of organizing complexity, produced qualities in the living

organism of which self-reproduction, self-repairing, as well as a certain number of cognitive or

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 127

informational aptitudes, are just a few examples. From that moment, vitalism and reductionism

had to be rejected, and emergence acquired cardinal importance, because a certain type of

organizing complexity produces qualities specific to self-organization.

The human spirit or mind (mens, mente) is emergent. It is the brain-culture link that

produces, as emergences, psychic and mental qualities with all that this involves such as

language, consciousness, etc.

Reductionists are unable to conceive of the reality of the spirit and want to explain

everything in terms of neurons. Spiritualists, incapable of conceiving of the emergence of the

spirit starting from the brain-culture relationship, turn the brain into, at most, a kind of television.

9. The complexity of organization

Emergence is fundamental, but it redirects us to the problem of organization, and it is

organization which gives consistency to our universe. Why is there organization in the universe?

We cannot answer this question, but we can examine the nature of organization. If we already

think that there are problems of irreducibility, of indeductibility, and of complex relations

between parts and whole and if we think, moreover, that a system is a unit composed of different

parts, and then we must bond unity and plurality or, at least, diversity. We realize that we must

arrive at a logical complexity, because we must link concepts which are normally diametrically

opposed, like unity and diversity. Even chance and necessity, and disorder and order, must be

combined to understand the genesis of physical organization, such as the plausible assumption

that the carbon atom, which is necessary for the creation of life, was constituted in a star prior to

the existence of our sun, by the simultaneous meeting–absolute coincidence– of three helium

nuclei. In stars where there are billions of interactions and meetings, chance made these nuclei

meet, but when this chance event occurred, it was necessary that a carbon atom was created.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 128

We are obliged to link order, disorder, and organization, which we traditionally consider

opposed in accordance with the understanding that unfortunately has been instilled in us since

childhood. Then, we comprehend what I have called self-eco-organization, i.e. living

organization.

10. Self-eco-organization
By the end of the 50's, the word self-organization emerged and was used by mathematicians,

engineers, cyberneticists, and neurologists.

Three important conferences were held on the topic of "self-organizing systems," but,

paradoxically, biology did not embrace the concept. It was a marginal biologist, Henri Atlan,

who adopted this idea in the 70’s in great intellectual isolation within his institution. Finally, the

word emerged in the 80's and 90's in Santa Fe as a new idea, even though it had existed already

for nearly half a century. However, it is still not a mainstream concept in biology.

I define self-eco-organization as living organization, according to the idea that self-

organization depends on its environment to draw energy and information. Indeed, as the process

which constitutes an organization works to maintain itself, it loses energy as a result of its work.

It must, therefore, draw energy from its environment. Moreover, it must seek sustenance and

defend itself against threats. It must, therefore, possess some minimal cognitive capacities.

Consequently, we arrive at what I logically call the autonomy/dependence complex. For a

living being to be autonomous, it must depend on its environment for matter and energy as well

as knowledge and information. The more autonomy develops, the more multiple dependencies

develop. The more my computer allows me to have autonomous thought, the more it will depend

on electricity, networks, and sociological and material constraints. We arrive then at a new

complexity for the living organization: autonomy cannot be understood separate from its broader
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 129

ecology. Moreover, we must see a self-generating and self-producing process; that is to say, a

recursive loop that challenges us to break our classical ideas of [Insert figure 10] and [Insert

figure 11].

In a self-generating, self-producing, autopoietic or self-organizing process, the products

are necessary for their own production. We are the products of a process of reproduction, but this

process can continue only if we, as individuals, couple to continue the process. Society is the

product of interactions between human individuals, but society is constituted by its emergences,

its culture, its language, which feeds back to the individuals and so produces them as humans and

supplies them with language and culture. We are products and producers. Causes produce effects

that are necessary for their own causation.

Norbert Wiener articulated the notion of a loop in the idea of feedback, whether negative

or positive, but finally mainly negative. Then, it was generalized without anyone really reflecting

on its epistemological consequences. Even in the most banal example, such as a thermal system

with a boiler that heats a building, we have this idea of inseparability of cause and effect. Thanks

to the thermostat, when a temperature of 20º C is reached, the heat stops; when the temperature

dips below a given minimum, the heat restarts. It is a circular system. The effect itself intervenes

in the cause, which allows the thermal autonomy of the whole compared to a cold environment.

In other words, the feedback is a process that complexifies causality, but the consequences of

this have not been address at an epistemological level.

Feedback is already a complex concept, even in non-living systems. Negative feedback

makes it possible to cancel the deviations that form unceasingly, like a fall in temperature

compared to a standard. Positive feedback develops when a regulated system ceases to cancel the

deviations. Then, these deviations are amplified and accelerated in a runway fashion in a kind of
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 130

generalized disintegration, as is often the case in our physical world. Yet as we have seen that,

following an idea advanced more than fifty years ago by Magoroh Maruyama, positive feedback,

i.e. increasing deviation, allows for transformation in human history. All of the great

transformational processes started with deviations, such as the monotheist deviation in a

polytheist world, the religious deviation of the message of Jesus within the Jewish world. Then, a

deviation within deviation, Paul transforms the deviation within the Roman Empire, and yet

another deviation, the message of Mohammed is driven out of Mecca and takes refuge in

Medina. The birth of capitalism is itself a deviation in a feudal world. The birth of modern
th th
science is a deviant process within the XVII century. Socialism is a deviant idea in the XIX

century. In other words, all the processes start by deviations that, when they are not suffocated or

exterminated, are then able to initiate chain transformations

11. The relationship between local and global

In logical complexity, we encounter the relationship between the local and the global.

Some believe they can encompass the two truths of the global and of the local with

axioms like: "think globally and act locally". In reality, I believe that we are obliged to think

locally and globally in this planetary age and to try to act at the same time locally and globally. It

is also the case that complex, local truths can become global errors. For example, if our immune

system vigorously rejected a heart transplant as if it were a dirty foreigner, this localized truth

would become a global error because our organism would die. Conversely, global truths can lead

to local errors. The need to fight against terrorism leads to interventions, which favor the

development of increased terrorism… as in Iraq.

12. Heraclitus: "life from death, death from life"

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This union of logically complex notions suggests a relationship between life and death. I often
th
quote Heraclitus’ illuminating phrase, from the VI century B.C., "life from death, death from

life", which we only recently started to understand, from the moment when our organism

degrades its energy to reconstitute its molecules, but that our cells also degrade and we produce

new ones. We live by the death of our cells, and this process of permanent regeneration, almost

of permanent rejuvenation, is the process of life. Therefore, we can confirm Enrich Bichat’s

correct statement that "life is the ensemble of the functions that fight against death", with this

strange complement that presents us with a logical complexity: "…integrating death to better

fight against death". What we know about this process is extremely interesting. Current research

reveals that cells that die are not only older cells. In fact, apparently healthy cells receiving

different messages from neighboring cells "decide," at a given moment, to commit suicide. They

commit suicide and phagocytes devour their remains. The organism determines which cells must

die before they reach senescence. The death of cells and their postmortem liquidation are

included in the living organization.

There is a phenomenon of self-destruction, of apoptosis, which is a term appropriated

from biology where it describes the process of timed cell death such as the dying and falling

leaves in autumn.

On the one hand, when the level of cellular death is insufficient following different

accidents and perturbations, there are a certain number of diseases that are deadly over time, like

osteoporosis, various types of sclerosis, and certain cancers, in which cells refuse to die, become

immortal, forming tumors, and then going for a stroll in the form of metastases. This action

could be interpreted as a revolt of cells against their individual demise that leads to death for the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 132

whole organism. On the other hand, an excess of cellular death causes AIDS, Parkinson's, and

Alzheimer's disease.

You see the extent to which this relationship between life and death is complex: it is

necessary for cells to die, but not too much! One lives between two catastrophes: the excess or

insufficiency of mortality. Once again, we face the fundamental, epistemological problem of

generalized complexity.

13. Non-trivial machines

Living beings are certainly machines; but, unlike artificial machines that are crude and

deterministic (where one can anticipate the output when one knows the input), living beings are

non-trivial machines (von Foerster) where one expects innovation.

We are machines. This truth was already espoused in La Mettrie’s L'homme-machine. We

are physical machines, thermal machines. We function optimally at a temperature of 37º C. But

we are complex machines.

Von Neumann established the difference between living machines and artificial machines

produced by technology. While being extremely reliable, the components of the technical

machines degrade and wear from the very start of their operation. Whereas the living machine is

comprised mainly by components that are far from reliable, such as degrading proteins, we

thoroughly understand that it is the lack of reliability of these proteins makes it possible to

reconstitute them constantly. The living machine is able to be regenerated and repaired. It also

moves towards death, but only after a process of growth. The key to this difference lies in the

living machine’s capacity of self-repair and self-regeneration. The term regeneration is of vital

important in this case.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 133

The innovations that emerge in the evolution of life either by environmental changes or

by the irruption of multiple, unforeseen events such as the appearance of the skeleton in

vertebrates or wings in insects, birds, or bats, are characteristic of non-trivial machines. That is to

say, non-trivial machines innovate in response to challenges that would be otherwise

insurmountable.

All the important figures of human history–whether intellectual, religious, messianic, or

political–were non-trivial machines. We can argue that the whole of human history, which began

ten thousand years ago, is a non-trivial history, a history made of unforeseen and unexpected

events, of destructions and creations. The history of life that preceded human history is a

nontrivial history, and the history of the universe, in which the birth of life and then of

humankind are included, is a non-trivial history.

We are obliged to detrivialize knowledge and our worldview.

14. To complexify the notion of chaos

We have seen how the notion of system brings us to the complexities of organizations, which

leads us to logical complexities. Now, let us examine chaos, which encompasses disorder and

unpredictibility, as it appears it chaos theory. The beating wings of a butterfly in Melbourne can

cause, through a succession of linked events, a hurricane in Jamaica, for example.

Actually, I believe the word chaos must be considered in its deepest sense, its Greek

sense. We know that, in the Greek worldview, chaos is at the origin of the cosmos. Chaos is not

pure disorder. Rather, it encompasses the lack of distinction between the potential of order,

disorder, and organization from which a cosmos, that is, an ordered universe, is born. The Greeks

saw a bit too much order in the cosmos. True, the cosmos is effectively ordered because the

immediate spectacle, the impeccable order of the sky that we see each night in the stars, is
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 134

always in the same place. If the planets are mobile, then they also return to the same place with

impeccable order. However, we know today, with the broadened conceptions of cosmic time,

that all this order is at once temporary and partial in a universe of movement, collision, and

transformation.

Chaos and cosmos are associated, and I sometimes use the word chaosmos because there

is a circular relationship between them. It is necessary to take the word chaos in a much deeper

and more intense sense than that of physical chaos theory.

15. The need for contextualization

Let us take again the term complexus, meaning "what is woven together." It is a very important

word, which indicates that the fracturing of knowledge prevents us from linking and

contextualizing.

The approach to knowledge characteristic of disciplinary science isolates objects, both

one from another and from their environments. We can assert that the principle of scientific

experimentation allows us to take a physical body in nature, isolate it in an artificial and

controlled laboratory environment, and then study its reactions to any perturbations and

variations which we apply. Indeed, this approach allows us to discover some of its qualities and

properties, but this principle of decontextualization was ill-fated, as soon as it was applied to

living beings. Jane Goodall’s observation of a tribe of chimpanzees carried out in their natural

environment from 1960 on attests to the supremacy of observation in a natural environment over

experimentation in a laboratory.7 Tremendous patience was necessary for Jane to perceive that

chimpanzees had different personalities with rather complex relations of friendship and rivalry.

She discovered a whole psychology and sociology of chimpanzees that was invisible to studies

performed in a laboratory or in a cage.

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In ethology, the idea of knowing the living in their environment became paramount. Let

us repeat it: the autonomy of the living needs to be known in its environment.

Now that we are becoming aware of the degradations that our technical and economic

advancements are inflicting on the biosphere, we realize our vital link with this very biosphere

that we believe to have reduced to the rank of a manipulable object. If we degrade it, we degrade

ourselves, and if we destroy it, we destroy ourselves.

The need for contextualization is extremely important. I would even say that it is a

principle of knowledge: Anyone who translates something into a foreign language will seek an

unknown word in the dictionary; but if the word is polysemous, one doesn’t immediately know

which translation is correct. We will then seek the meaning of the word in the sense of the

sentence and in light of the global sense of the text. Through this exercising of moving from text

to word, then from text to context, and finally from context to word, a sense emerges. In other

words, immersion in the text and in the context is an evident cognitive necessity. Take, for

example, economics, the most advanced social science from a mathematical point of view, which

is isolated from human, social, historical, and sociological contexts. It can only make weak

predictions because the economy does not function in isolation. Its forecasts must be revised

continually, which reveals the limitations of a science that may be advanced, but too inward

looking.

More generally, mutual contextualization is lacking in all of the social sciences. Often, I

have quoted the case of the Aswan dam because it is revealing and significant: it was built in

Nasser’s Egypt to regulate the course of a capricious river, the Nile, and to produce electric

power for a country in need. However, after some time, what happened? This dam retained some

of the silt that fertilized the Nile valley, which caused the farming population to abandon the
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fields and overpopulate large cities like Cairo. Also, it retained part of the fish that fed the people

who lived around the Nile, and, today, the accumulation of silt weakens the dam and causes new

technical problems. This does not mean that the dam should not have been built, but if decisions

are made solely on a techno-economic basis, they are likely to have disastrous consequences.

It is like the deviation of rivers in Siberia ordered by the Soviet government where the

negative consequences were greater than the positive ones.

It is therefore necessary to recognize the inseparability of the separable at the historical

and social levels in the same way that us has already been recognized at the microphysical level.

According to quantum physics and confirmed by Aspect's experiments, two microphysical

entities are immediately connected, although they may be separated by space and time. We can

conclude therefore that everything that is separated is at the same time inseparable.

16. The hologrammatic and dialogical principles

We must also submit to the hologrammatic principle, which states that not only is the part

contained in the whole, but the whole is also contained in the part. Just as all of our genetic

inheritance is found in each cell of our organism, society with its culture is contained in the spirit

of an individual.

We return again to the logical core of complexity which, as we will see, is dialogical:

separability-inseparability, whole-parts, effect-cause, product-producer, life-death, homo

sapiens-homo demens, etc.

The principle of the excluded middle reaches its limit. This principle states that "A cannot

be A and not A", whereas it can be one and the other. For example, Spinoza is Jewish and non-

Jewish; he is neither Jewish, nor non-Jewish. Here the dialogic is not the response to these
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 137

paradoxes, but the means of facing them by considering the complementarity of antagonisms and

the productive, sometimes vital, interaction of complementary antagonisms.

17. Some consequences for the sciences

This generates some consequences for the sciences. First, classical science is complex even when

it produces simplifying knowledge. Why?

Because science is a quadruped that walks on the following four legs: the leg of

empiricism comprised of data, experimentation or observation; the leg of rationality, comprised

of logically constituted theories; the leg of verification, always necessary; and the leg of

imagination, because great theories are the products of a powerful, creative imagination. Science

is complex, produced by a quadruped movement that prevents it from solidifying.

Objective knowledge, which is the ideal in classical science, required the elimination of

subjectivity, i.e. the emotional part inherent to each observer, to each scientist. But it also

included the elimination of the subject, i.e. the being who conceives and knows. However, any

knowledge, including objective knowledge, is simultaneously a cerebral translation of data from

the external world and a mental reconstruction, based on certain organizing potentials of the

spirit. Certainly, the idea of pure objectivity is utopian. Scientific objectivity is produced by

beings who are subjects within given historical conditions and are following the rules of the

scientific game. Kant’s great contribution was to show that the object of knowledge is co-

constructed by our spirit. He showed us that it is necessary to be familiar with knowledge, to

know its possibilities and limits. The knowledge of knowledge is a requirement of complex

thinking.

As Husserl indicated in the 1930’s, especially in his lecture on the crisis of European

science, the sciences developed extremely sophisticated means to know external objects, but no
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 138

means to know themselves. There is no science of science. Even the science of science would be

insufficient if it did not include epistemological problems. Science is a tumultuous building site.

Science is a process that cannot be anticipated, because we can never know what we will find,

since the main trait of discovery is its unexpectedness. Today, this uncontrolled process has led

to the development of a great potential for destruction and manipulation, which necessitates a

double awareness in science: self-awareness and ethical awareness.

I also believe that it will be increasingly necessary to pursue scientific knowledge that

integrates the knowledge of the human spirit with the knowledge of the object that captivates the

human spirit while recognizing the inseparability between object and subject.

18. Two scientific revolutions introduced complexity

Previously, I explained how the concept of complexity emerged marginally among

mathematicians and engineers. In fact, the XXth century witnessed two scientific revolutions,

which introduced complexity without recognizing it explicitly.

th
After thermodynamics in the XIX century, the first revolution was in microphysics and

astrophysics, which introduced indeterminism and risk where determinism once reigned and

which elaborated suitable methods to deal with the uncertainties it discovered.

The second revolution gathers the disciplines and restores between them a common

fabric. It began in the second half of the century. In the 60’s, Earth sciences conceived of the

Earth as a complex physical system, which made it possible to articulate geology with

seismology, vulcanology, meteorology, ecology, etc. At the same time, ecology developed as a

scientific discipline, bringing together data and information from different physical and

biological branches of science in the conception of ecosystems. It became possible to understand

how an ecosystem degrades, develops, or maintains homeostasis. From the 1970’s on, ecological
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 139

concepts extended to the whole biosphere, introducing knowledge from the social sciences to the

sciences.

Although ecology, at the biosphere level, cannot make rigorous predictions, it can

provide us with vital hypotheses, concerning, for example, global warming, which is increasingly

becoming evident with the melting of glaciers in the Antarctic and the Arctic. Ecology,

cosmology, and Earth sciences became poly-disciplinary sciences, even transdisciplinary. Sooner

or later, this shift will reach biology, which will establish the idea of self-organization.

Eventually, this shift will alter the social sciences,8 although they are proving extremely

resistant.

Finally, the observer who is eliminated by the search for objectivity was introduced into

certain sciences, such as microphysics, where the observer disrupts whatever she observes. In the

case of cosmology, even if we do not adhere to what Brandon Carter calls the Anthropic

Principle, which considers the place of humans in the universe, we are obliged to consider that

this universe, among its perhaps negligible possibilities, holds the possibility of human life,

perhaps only on this planet Earth, but perhaps also elsewhere.

The common fabric between the human and the living universe can be restored, requiring

a complex way of thinking capable simultaneously of distinguishing the human from the natural

world while at the same time integrating them.

19. The introduction of science into history

In addition, there is the problem of the introduction of the sciences into human history. As we

know, there are two ways to understand the history of the sciences: the internalist conception and

the externalist conception. The internalist conception analyzes the development of the sciences in
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isolation, exclusively in terms of their internal logic and their own discoveries. The externalist

mode accounts for the historical and social developments that determine scientific developments.

I think we must attempt to link both, and this is appropriate for other developments apart

from those within the sciences. Some researchers wanted to understand the perversion of the

Soviet Union in terms of internal factors, such as the shortcomings of Marxist doctrine or

Lenin’s limitations. Others wanted to blame it on external elements such as the siege and

hostility of the capitalist powers toward the Soviet Union or on pre-existing elements such as the

backwardness of Tsarist Russia. However, the true cognitive challenge is to link these two

aspects in a dialogical fashion.

If we continue to adopt the viewpoint of the modern Western history of science, we

observe how –from its marginal and quasi-deviant birth in the XVIIth century—it developed in
th
the XVIIIth, emerged in universities in the XIXth and into states and companies in the XX , and

became a central and driving force within human history in the form of techno-science. It

produces not only all the major elements for a renewed knowledge of the world and beneficial

effects for humanity, but also formidable and uncontrolled powers that threaten it.

I don't know if I am right or wrong in borrowing an expression from Vico, but we must

arrive at a “scienza nuova.” Most astutely, Vico inscribed the historical perspective at the very

heart of scienza nuova. It is necessary to broaden the idea of scienza nuova by introducing the

interaction between the simple and the complex, by conceiving of a science that does not

suppress disciplines, but connects them, and consequently makes them fertile, a science that can

simultaneously distinguish and connect and in which transdisciplinarity is inseparable from

complexity.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 141

Just as the compartmentalization of disciplines disintegrates the natural fabric of

complexity, a transdisciplinary vision is capable of restoring it.

20. The link between science and philosophy

The link between science and philosophy was broken. As recently as the XVIIth century, the

great scientists were also great philosophers. Certainly, they did not distinguish between science

and philosophy. When Pascal was having his experiences in Puy de Dôme, he did not think about

the problem of the wager. In the times of Pascal, Gassendi, and Leibniz, this division did not

exist. However, over time this division became a formidable chasm. This chasm of ignorance

separates the scientific culture from the culture of the humanities.

But the trend has started to reverse. The most advanced sciences are arriving at

fundamental philosophical problems: Why has a universe emerged out of nothing? How was this

universe born from a vacuum that, at the same time, was not a vacuum? What is reality? Is the

essence of the universe veiled or totally knowable?

The problem of life rises at a level of complexity that exceeds biology: the singular

conditions of its origin and how its creative powers emerge. Bergson was mistaken in thinking

that there was an élan vital, but he was right when speaking about creative evolution. He could

even have spoken about evolutionary creativity.

Today, we can foresee the possibility of creating life. From the moment when we believe

that life is a process developed exclusively from physico-chemical matter under certain

conditions –in underwater thermal vents or elsewhere—we can conceive of creating the physical,

chemical, and thermodynamic conditions that give birth to organisms gifted with the qualities of

life. We can also foresee the possibility of modifying human biology. Therefore, we must
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 142

meditate on life, as we have never before, and we must also meditate on our relationship with the

biosphere.

All the most advanced sciences arrive at fundamental philosophical problems that they

thought were eliminated. They not only find them again, but they renew them.

If we define philosophy as the will and capacity of reflection, then it is necessary to

introduce reflection into the sciences, without eliminating the relative autonomy of neither

philosophy nor science.

Finally and especially, any knowledge, including scientific knowledge, must include

epistemological reflection on its own foundations, principles, and limits.

Even today, many entertain the illusion that complexity is a philosophical and not a

scientific problem. In one sense, this is true, yet in another, it is false. It is true when we examine

it from the point of view of an isolated and fragmented object. The fact that you isolate and break

the object into pieces makes the complexity disappear: it is therefore not a scientific problem

from the point of view of a closed discipline and a decontextualized object. As soon as you start

to connect these isolated objects, you come face to face with the problem of complexity.

21. Second epistemological rupture with restricted complexity

It is here that a second epistemological rupture with restricted complexity appears.

Restricted complexity is essentially interested in dynamic systems known as complex

systems. That is to say, it constitutes its own scientific field.

But generalized complexity not only concerns all fields, but also relates to our knowledge

as human beings, individuals, persons, and citizens. Since we have been domesticated by our

education, which taught us to separate rather than to connect, our aptitude for connecting is

underdeveloped, and our aptitude for separating is overdeveloped. I repeat: knowing is, at the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 143

same time, separating and connecting, analyzing and synthesizing. They are inseparable, and the

atrophy of our capacity to connect in a planetary, complex way, recognizing the interdependence

of everything and everyone, becomes increasingly grave.

The International Ethical, Political and Scientific Collegium formulated a declaration of

interdependence which it hopes the United Nations will adopt. We must conceive of

interdependence in all fields, including the complex relationship between the parts and the

whole. We need to be able to face the uncertainties of life when nothing prepares us for them.

We need to develop ways for humans to understand each other, although nobody teaches us how.

We need to face complexity, including complexity in and for action, while opposing the principle

of caution and the principle of risk. Pericles expressed the union of the two antagonistic

principles when he stated in a speech to the Athenians during the Peloponnesian war: "We

Athenians are capable of combining prudence and audacity, whereas the others are either timid

or rash". It is the combination which we need. It is also the case that today we are required to be

quite innovative in our precautions.

We must undertake deep reforms in all of our ways of knowing and thinking.

22. The principle of ecology of action

The principle of ecology of action is, in my opinion, central. When an action enters a given

environment, it escapes from the will and intention of its creator. It engages in interactions and

multiple feedbacks and, consequently, diverted off course, and sometimes even directed away.

The ecology of action has a universal value, including for the development of the sciences,

whose destructive nuclear consequences were absolutely unexpected.

Consider that when Fermi elucidated the structure of the nucleus of the atom in the

1930´s, it was a purely speculative discovery, and he had by no means thought that this would
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 144

lead to the construction of an atomic bomb. However, a few years later, Fermi went to the United

States to contribute to the development of a bomb that would be used on Hiroshima and

Nagasaki. When Watson and Crick determined the structure of the genetic inheritance in DNA,

they thought that it was a great achievement of knowledge without any practical consequences.

Hardly ten years after their discovery, scientists proposed genetic manipulation to the biology

community.

The ecology of action has a universal value. We can draw plenty of examples from recent

French history: the dissolution of Parliament by President Jacques Chirac to achieve a

governmental majority led unexpectedly to a socialist majority. A referendum called to win

general support led to its rejection. Gorbachev attempted a reform to save the Soviet Union, but

it contributed to its disintegration. The Russian Revolution of 1917 was intended to suppress the

exploitation of human beings by their fellow human beings, and to create a new society, founded

on the principles of community and liberty. However, this revolution not only caused immense

bloodshed, destruction, and repression by a police system, but, after seventy years, it led to the

opposite of its stated goals, to a capitalism even more fierce and savage than that of the tsarist

times and with a return of religion! Everything that this revolution wanted to destroy was

resurrected. How can we not think about the ecology of action!

23. Creating "Institutes of fundamental culture"

The reform of the human spirit seems to me absolutely necessary.

It is because I understood that the reform of thought, a fundamental work that I undertook

in La Méthode, was a necessity, that I accepted the proposal of a French Minister of Education

when he asked me to study how to reform of the content of secondary education. I tried to

introduce my ideas of reform of thought into an educational project. I saw its total failure,
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 145

although it did not really fail, it was simply not applied! That caused me to reflect even more. I

wrote a book called La Tête bien faite and then, as an initiative of UNESCO, I wrote another

book called Les Sept Savoirs Nécessaires à l'éducation du futur (Seven Complex Lessons in

Education for the Future).8

As a consequence of a university which will be created following these principles in

Mexico, I had the more modest, but maybe more urgent idea of creating Instituts du culture

fondamentale (Institutes of Fundamental Culture), which could be hosted by a university or

operate independently, which would be open to everyone, i.e. students who are not yet in

university, or are in university, or have left the university, citizens, trade union members,

entrepreneurs, everybody.

Why the term "fundamental culture"? Because that is what is missing. In fact, it is the

most vital subject to be taught and the most important instrument with which to face life.

However, it is ignored by education.

(1) Knowledge as a source of error or illusion; nowhere are we taught the traps of knowledge

that arise because all knowledge is translated and reconstructed.

(2) Rationality, as if it were an obvious thing, whereas we know that rationality has its

perversions, its infantile or senile diseases.

(3) Science. What is science? What are its frontiers, its limits, its possibilities, its rules? There is

abundant literature about this, but, for example, the scientists who are recruited at Centre

National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) have never consulted it. Most of the time,

they do not know anything about the polemic between Niels Bohr and Einstein, the works of

Popper, Lakatos, Kuhn, etc.

(4) What is complexity?

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And also:

 Instruction on “human identity and the human condition", which is not found anywhere.

 Instruction on this planetary age, not only today's globalization, but including the

background starting from the conquest of the Americas, the colonization of the world, its

current phase, and its future prospects.

 Instruction on human understanding.

 Instruction on how to approach uncertainties in all fields: sciences, everyday life, history

(we have lost the certainty of progress, and the future is completely uncertain and

obscure).

 Instruction on the major problems facing civilization.

That is for me the fundamental education that can help to reform the spirit, of thought, of

knowledge, of action, of life.

24. I conclude: generalized complexity integrates restricted

complexity
Unfortunately, restricted complexity rejects generalized complexity, which appears to the former

as pure chatter, pure philosophy. It rejects it because restricted complexity did not go through the

epistemological and paradigmatic revolutions that complexity requires. This will come to pass,

without a doubt. But in the meantime, we observe that the many issues pertaining to complexity

have invaded all of our horizons, and I repeat "many issues", because it is as mistake to think that

we will find in complexity a single method that can be applied automatically to any individual or

planetary problem.

Complexity includes certain principles that help the autonomous spirit to achieve

knowledge. Whereas a program destroys the autonomy of the seeker, complexity stimulates an
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 147

autonomous, responsible strategy. Once we are aware that the ecology of action can pervert the

best intentions–we recast our decisions as bets, which incite us to develop an adequate strategy to

control the action as much as we can.

In other words, in all fields, I would say "help yourself and complexity will help you",

which has nothing to do with the mechanical application of a program or a rule. It is a profound

reconstruction of our mental functioning, of all of our being.

These now marginal, deviant ideas are beginning to establish a trend, or rather trends,

since there are several paths towards complexity, that are this point still in the minority. These

ideas, these deviations, can be developed and become cultural, political, and social forces.

The prospects of a globalized future are extremely alarming: our spaceship is propelled

by four engines without any control –science, technology, economy, and the search for profit –

all of this is chaotic since the techno-civilizational unification of the planet, under the auspices of

the Western powers, causes singular cultural resistances and cultural and religious prejudices.

The planet is in crisis with all the diverse potentialities that such a crisis offers: regressive

and destructive or stimulating and fertile, such as invention, creation, innovation.

25. We should seize the possibilities of metamorphosis

We should consider the possibility of metamorphosis because we have completely astonishing

examples of it from the past. The evolution in certain parts of the world where there had been

demographic concentrations in the Middle East, in the Indus basin, in China, in Mexico, or in

Peru from pre-historic societies of hundreds of inhabitants, without cities, state, agriculture,

army, or social classes, to enormous historical societies with cities, agriculture, army,

civilization, religion, philosophy, works of art... they constituted a sociological metamorphosis.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 148

Perhaps we are gravitating towards a meta-historical metamorphosis suitable for the birth

of a global society.

I would say that complexity does not only present us with perplexing uncertainty, but it

also allows us to see the probable and improbable, because improbably events have occurred in

the past and could again in the future.

We are in an epoch of doubtful and uncertain combat.

This brings to mind the Pacific War. After the Japanese occupied the Pacific Islands and

began to threaten California, there was a gigantic naval battle over 200 kilometers along the

Midway Islands between the Japanese and American fleets, which engaged numerous

battleships, aircraft carriers, submarines, and planes. A global vision was impossible for either

side to imagine: there were Japanese ships sunk, American ships sunk, planes that did not find

the enemy fleet… In short, total confusion, with the battle divided into several segments. At a

given moment, the Japanese admiral, realizing his losses in battleships and planes, thought that

they were defeated and called for retreat. The Americans, who had lost almost as much, were not

the first to think that they were defeated so, after the Japanese retreat, they were victorious.

Well, the outcome of what will happen now, we cannot yet conceive! But we can always

hope, and act in congruence with this hope.

Doesn’t the wisdom of complexity lie in exploring the range of possibilities without

restricting it to what is formally probable? Doesn't it invite us to reform, even to revolutionize

thought, society, education, our lives?

Notes
1. Originally presented at the Colloquium “Intelligence de la complexité: épistémologie et

pragmatique”, Cerisy-La Salle, France, June 26th, 2005 and published as “Restricted
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 149

complexity, general complexity,” In C. Gershenson, D. Aerts & B. Edmonds (Eds.),

Worldviews, science, and us: Philosophy and complexity. Copyright 2007, World

Scientific Publishing Company.

2. Cf (1990). La Méthode. 4. Les idées. (Method. 4. Ideas). Paris: Le Seuil. pp. 211-238.

3. Weaver, W. (1948). Science and Complexity. American Scientist 36, 536–544.

4. I develop the idea that organization consists of complexity in La Méthode 1, La nature de

la nature, [Method. 1. The nature of nature]. pp.94-151, Paris: Le Seuil, 1977.

5. Science and Future, a popular French magazine (Translator’s note).

6. See Morin, E. (1973). Le Paradigme perdu. (Paradigm lost). Paris: Seuil. pp. 51-54.

7. Cf (2014) La Méthode. 5. Humanité de l’humanité. (Method. 5. Humanity). Paris: Le

Seuil.

8. Morin, E. (2001). Seven complex lessons in education for the future. Paris: UNESCO.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 150

Chapter 4: From the Concept of System to the

Paradigm of Complexity1
Translation by Sean Kelly

Abstract
This paper is an overview of the author's ongoing reflections on the need for a new paradigm of

complexity capable of informing all theories, whatever their field of application or the

phenomena in question. Beginning with a critique of General System Theory and the principle of

holism with which it is associated, the author suggests that contemporary advances in our

knowledge of organization call for a radical reformation in our organization of knowledge. This

reformation involves the mobilization of recursive thinking, which is to say a manner of thinking

capable of establishing a dynamic and generative feedback loop between terms or concepts (such

as whole and part, order and disorder, observer and observed, system and ecosystem, etc.) that

remain both complementary and antagonistic. The paradigm of complexity thus stands as a bold

challenge to the fragmentary and reductionistic spirit that continues to dominate the scientific

enterprise.

Introduction: Mastering the Concept of System

In contrast with the idea of a general theory of systems (or even a theory specific to systems), I

wish, in the following pages, to propose the idea of a system paradigm capable of informing all

theories, whatever their field of application or the phenomena in question.

The first thing we must do is master the concept of system. Though system theory

revealed the generality of systems, it did not uncover their "genericity." Although everything

from molecules to stars, from cells to societies, is now regarded in terms of systems (in contrast

with the previous century's notions of "matter" and "vital substance"), this generality is not, by

itself, sufficient to determine the epistemological significance of the notion of system in all its
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 151

conceptual complexity. As the concept of system now stands, though it is embedded in a general

theory ("general system theory"), it does not constitute a paradigmatic principle; rather, the

principle invoked is that of holism; which seeks explanation at the level of the totality, in opposi-

tion to the reductionist paradigm that seeks explanation at the level of elementary components.

As I shall demonstrate, however, this "holism" arises from the same simplifying principle as the

reductionism to which it is opposed (that is, a simplification of, and reduction to, the whole). I

have already indicated (Morin, 1977, p. 101) how system theory has failed to lay its own

foundation by elucidating the concept of system. The system paradigm remains larval, atrophied,

and inchoate; system theory thus suffers from a fundamental defect: it tends to fall repeatedly

into the reductive, simplificatory, mutilating, and manipulative ruts from which it was supposed

to have freed itself (and us along with it).

In order to make sense of the concept of system, we must postulate a new, non-holistic

principle of knowledge. This win be possible, however, only if we conceive of systems not only

in general, but in generic or generative terms—that is, in terms of a paradigm (a paradigm being

defined here as the set of fundamental relations of association and/or opposition among a

restricted number of master notions-relations that command or control all thoughts, discourses,

and theories).

The concept of system has always played a fundamental role in defining every set of

relations among component parts that form a whole. The concept only becomes revolutionary,

however, when, instead of completing the definition of things, bodies, and objects, it replaces the

former definition of the thing or the object as something constituted of form and substance that is

decomposable into primary elements, as something that can be neatly isolated in a neutral space,

and as something subject solely to the external laws of "nature." From that moment on, the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 152

concept of system necessarily breaks with the classical ontology of the object. (As we shall see,

the object conceived of by classical science is a mere cutaway drawing, an appearance, a

construct-something both simplified and one-dimensional that mutilates and abstracts from a

complex reality that is rooted both in physical as well as in psychocultural organization.) We are

aware of the universal scope of the shift from the notion of object to the notion of system;

however, what we have yet to grasp is the radical nature of this shift and the truly novel point of

view it brings with it.

The System Paradigm

A. The Whole is Not a Catch-All

Holism is a partial, one--dimensional, and simplifying vision of the whole. It reduces all other

system-related ideas to the idea of totality, whereas it should be a question of confluence. Holism

thus arises from the paradigm of simplification (or reduction of the complex to a master-concept

or master-category).

Pascal had already given expression to the new paradigm introduced by the idea of

system: "I consider it as impossible to know the parts without knowing the whole as to know the

whole without knowing the individual parts" (Pascal, 1966 [1662], p. 93, Brunschvicg ed., #72).

According to the logic of simplification, such a proposition leads to that impasse which Gregory

Bateson called a double-bind: the two injunctions (to know the parts through the whole; to know

the whole through the parts) seem bound to cancel each other out in a vicious circle without

entrance or exit.

[Insert Figure 14]

Rather, one must extract from Pascal's formula a higher kind of understanding founded on the

constructive circularity of the explanation of the whole through the parts and of the parts through
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 153

the whole-that is to say, an understanding wherein these two explanations complement each

other by virtue of the very motion which joins them, without canceling out all of their

competitive and antagonistic characteristics.

This active loop is what constitutes the description and the explanation. At the same time,

the maintenance of a certain opposition and of a certain free play between the two explanatory

processes-which according to the logic of simplification are mutually exclusive-is not vicious,

but fruitful.2 Moreover, the search for explanation in the retroactive motion of each of these

processes with respect to the other one [Insert figure 15] constitutes a first introduction of

complexity at the level of the paradigm (for, as we shall see, we would be mistaken to

acknowledge complexity at the phenomenal level, while overlooking it at the level of the

explanatory principle; rather, precisely at the level of principle is where complexity must be

revealed).

By the same token, we should conceive of systems not only in terms of global unity

(which is purely and simply to substitute a simple macro-unity for the simple elementary unity of

reductionism), but in terms of a unitas multiplex; here again, antagonistic terms are necessarily

coupled. The whole is effectively a macro-unity, but the parts are not fused or confused therein;

they have a double identity, one which continues to belong to each of them individually (and is

thus irreducible to the whole), and one which is held in common (constituting, so to speak, their

citizenship in the system). More than that, the examples of atomic, biological, and social systems

show us that a system is not only a composition of unity out of diversity, but also a composition

of internal diversity out of unity (e.g., the Pauli exclusion principle which creates diversification

of electron shells around the nucleus; biological morphogenetic processes in which an

undifferentiated egg develops into an organism composed of extremely diversified cells and
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 154

organs; and societies which not only give a common cultural identity to diverse individuals, but

also, by means of this culture, permit the development of differences). Once again, one must

invoke a way of thinking that flows in a circle (see Figure 16) between two mutually-exclusive

explanatory principles: on the one hand, the unifying way of thinking becomes increasingly

homogenizing and loses diversity; on the other hand, the differentiating way of thinking becomes

a mere catalogue and loses unity.

Again, this is not a question of "calculating the correct dose" or of "equilibrating" these

[Insert figure 16]

[Insert figure 17]

two explanatory processes; rather, one must integrate them in an active loop which allows us to

grasp what is shown in Figure 17:

To take the problem of maintaining the relations between the whole and the parts, or the

one and the many, as central is not enough; we must also see the complex character of these

relations, which I will formulate here somewhat schematically (for further development, see

Morin, 1977, pp. 105-128). To wit:

 The whole is greater than the sum of the parts (a principle which is widely acknowledged

and intuitively recognized at all macroscopic levels), since a macro-unity arises at the

level of the whole, along with emergent phenomena, i.e., new qualities or properties.

 The whole is less than the sum of the parts, since some of the qualities or properties of the

parts are inhibited or suppressed altogether under the influence of the constraints

resulting from the organization of the whole.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 155

 The whole is greater than the whole, since the whole as a whole affects the parts retroac-

tively, while the parts in turn retroactively affect the whole (in other words, the whole is

more than a global entity—it has a dynamic organization).

Within this framework is where such key concepts as being, existence, and life should be

understood as global emergent qualities; such concepts are not primary (or radical or essential)

qualities, but real instances of emergence. Indeed, being and existence are emergent from all

processes containing feed-back loops (Morin, 1977, esp. pp. 210-216). Life is a cluster of

emergent qualities resulting from the process of interaction and organization between the parts

and the whole, a cluster which itself retroactively affects the parts, the interactions, and the

partial and global processes that produced it. All of which yields the following complex

explanatory principle: the phenomenal must not be reduced to the generative, nor the

"superstructure" to the "infrastructure." Rather, explanation should seek to understand the kind of

process whose products or end-results bring about a return to the initial state. Such as process

may be called recursive (see Figure 18):

 The parts are at once less and greater than the parts. The most remarkable emergent

phenomena within a highly complex system, such as human society, occur not only at the

level of the whole (society), but also at the level of the individuals (even especially at that

level-witness the fact that self-consciousness only emerges in individuals). In this sense:

 The parts are sometimes greater than the whole. As Stafford Beer (1960, p. 16) has

noted: "[T]he most profitable control system for the parts does not exclude the

bankruptcy of the whole." "Progress" does not necessarily consist in the construction of

larger and larger wholes; on the contrary, it may lie in the freedom and independence of

small components. The richness of the universe is not found in its dissipative totality, but
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 156

in the small reflexive entities-the deviant and peripheral units-which have self-assembled

within it, as Günther (1962) and Spencer Brown (1972) have observed. This idea is

echoed in Pascal's dictum: "But even if the universe were to crush him, man would still

be nobler than his slayer, because he knows that he is dying and the advantage the

universe has over him. The universe knows none of this" (Pascal, 1966 [1662], p. 95,

Brunschvicg ed., #347).

[Insert Figure 18]

 The whole is less than the whole. Within every whole there are penumbras and mutual

incomprehensions-indeed schisms and rifts-between the repressed and the expressed, the

submerged and the emergent, the generative and the phenomenal. There are black holes

at the heart of every biological totality, especially every anthropo-social totality. The

isolated individual is not the only one who has no knowledge or awareness of the social

totality, this social totality is also ignorant and unconscious of the dreams, aspirations,

thoughts, loves, and hates of the individuals; and the billions of cells constituting these

individuals are themselves ignorant of these same dreams, aspirations, thoughts, loves,

hates, and so on. If one places this conception of black holes, penumbras, schisms, and

mutual incomprehensions at the very heart of the system paradigm, then this paradigm

opens out spontaneously onto the modern theories of the individual unconscious (Freud)

and the social unconscious (Marx).

 The whole is insufficient, which follows from the preceding.

 The whole contains uncertainty. We shall see below that one cannot with any certainty

isolate or circumscribe a single system from among the systems of systems of systems

with which it is interlocked and in which it is nested. This uncertainty is also due to the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 157

fact that, in the living world, we have to do with poly totalities whose every term can be

conceived of both as part and as whole. Thus, with regard to Homo, which of the

following is the system: the society, the species, or the individual?

 The whole contains conflict. I have already tried to show (Morin, 1977, pp. 118-122, 217-

224) that every system contains forces that are antagonistic to its own perpetuation. These

antagonisms are either virtualized/neutralized, constantly controlled/repressed (through

regulation and negative feedback), or made use of and incorporated. In stars, the

conjunction of contrary processes-one tending toward implosion, the other toward

explosion-creates a spontaneous self-organizing, auto-regulation. Living organization can

only be understood as a function of a continual process of disorganization which

degrades molecules and cells uninterruptedly as they are being reproduced. At the level

of human societies, Montesquieu's idea that social conflicts caused the decline of the

Roman Empire, but also its grandeur, must be understood systemically-as well as, of

course, Marx's idea linking the class structure of society with class conflict.

Also, we must found the idea of system on a non-totalitarian and non-hierarchical

concept of the whole, and, more particularly, on a complex concept of the unitas multiplex as a

means of access to polytotalities. This preliminary paradigm is, in fact, of capital social and

political importance. The paradigm of holistic simplification leads to a neo-totalitarian

functionalism and accommodates itself easily to all the modem forms of totalitarianism. In any

event, it leads to the manipulation of the individual units in the name of the whole. In contrast,

the logic of the paradigm of complexity not only aims at "truer" knowledge, it stimulates the

search for a complex praxis and politics. (I shall return to this point below.)
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 158

B. The Macro-Concept

The system problematic cannot be resolved by the whole-parts relation, and the holist paradigm

overlooks two terms of capital importance: interactions and organization.

Whole-parts relations must necessarily be mediated by the middle term of interactions.

This term is all the more important given the fact that most systems are composed, not of "parts"

or "components," but of actions among complex units, which are themselves composed of

interactions.

It has been justly remarked that it is not the cells, but the actions taking place among the

cells, that constitute an organism. Now, the set of these interactions constitutes the organization

of the system. Organization is the concept that gives constructive coherence, order, regulation,

structure, etc., to the interactions. In fact, the notion of system comprises three different

concepts:

 system (which expresses the complex unity and phenomenal character of the whole, as

well as the complex of relations between the whole and the parts);

 interaction (which expresses the set of interwoven relations, actions, and reactions which

collectively create a system); and

 organization (which expresses the constitutive character of these interactions as forming,

maintaining, protecting, regulating, governing, and regenerating the system-in short, the

thing that gives the idea of system its conceptual backbone).

These three terms are indissoluble; each one implies the other two, and the absence of anyone

seriously mutilates the macroconcept of system. The idea of system without the notion of

organization is just as defective as the notion of organization without the idea of system. We are
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 159

dealing with a macroconcept. We must recognize that our consciousness has been shaped by the

paradigm of simplification and that the concepts we have at our disposal are atomistic rather than

molar, chemical rather than organismic, isolated and static rather than coproductive, recursive,

and interdependent.

The idea of organization first emerged in the sciences under the name of structure. But

structure is an atrophied concept which refers more to the idea of order (invariant laws) than to

that of organization. The "structuralist" vision arises from simplification (it tends to reduce the

phenomenality of the system to the structure which generates it; and it fails to take into account

the recursive influence of emergent phenomena and the whole on the organization itself).

In most natural physical systems, and in all biological systems, organization is active-

what one might call organizaction. That is, it includes the supply, storage, distribution, and

control of energy, as well as its expenditure and dissipation through work. In a manner of

[Insert Figure 19]

speaking, organizaction produces both entropy (that is, the degradation of the system and of

itself) and negentropy (the regeneration of the system and of itself). Therefore, we obviously

must conceive of the relation between entropy and negentropy in a complex manner-not as two

terms in Manichaean opposition, but rather as bound inseparably one to the other (Morin, 1977,

pp. 291-296). But, above all, we must conceive of organization as (a) the continual

reorganization of a system tending toward disorganization; and (b) as continual self-

reorganization-that is to say, not just organization, but auto-re-organization. As far as the

organization of living things is concerned, there is yet another polarity: on the one hand, with

respect to generativity (the genetic organization containing the putative program of the

"genotype"), and on the other hand, with respect to phenomenality (the organization of the

activities and behaviors of the "phenotype"). In other words, this is a question of auto-(geno-
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 160

pheno)-re-organization. To complete the picture, we must add that such an organization involves

an exchange with the environment, which itself furnishes organization (in the form of plant and

animal nutriments) and potential organization (in the form of information). This environment

itself constitutes a macro-organization in the form of an ecosystem (the conjunction of the

organizational level of the biocenosis within that of the biotope). Biological organization is at

once a closed form of organization (preservation of integrity and autonomy) and an open form of

organization (exchanges with the environment or ecosystem): therefore, it is an auto-eco-

organization. Thus, from the least complex living thing (unicellular organism) up to and

including the level of human societies, all organization is at the least an: auto-(geno-pheno)-eco-

re-organization.

We see, therefore, that the problem of organization cannot be reduced to a few structural

rules. Right from the start, the concept of biological-and a fortiori social-organization is a super-

macro-concept, which itself belongs to the macro-concept system/interactions/organization.

Organization is a higher paradigmatic concept. The paradigm of classical science held

explanation to consist in reduction to a principle of order (laws, invariances, averages, etc.).

Here, this is not a question of replacing order with organization, but of combining them that is to

say, of introducing the principle of system organization as an irreducible explanatory principle.

In so doing, the concept of disorder is necessarily introduced as well. Organization creates order

(by creating its own systemic determinism), but it also creates disorder. On the one hand,

systemic determinism can be flexible, containing zones of randomness, free play, and freedom;

while on the other hand, as we have said, the work associated with organization produces

disorder (entropy increase). In all instances of organization, the presence and continual

production of disorder (degradation, degeneration) are inseparable from organization itself. In

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 161

this respect, therefore, the paradigm of organization also entails a reformation in the way we

think. From now on, explanation must no longer banish disorder or obscure organization; rather,

it must always recognize the complexity of the relation shown in Figure 20.

Thus, the new paradigm entails uncertainties and antagonisms by bringing together terms

that are mutually interconnected. But the new scientific spirit inaugurated by Bohr consists in

making progress in knowledge not by eliminating uncertainty and contradiction, but by

recognizing them-that is to say, by bringing into the open the penumbra contained in all

knowledge-that is, by making progress in ignorance! I use the word "progress" advisedly,

because ignorance which is recognized, recorded, and, so to speak, deepened, is qualitatively

different from ignorance which remains ignorant of itself.

[Insert Figure 20]

Finally, we must break with the mutilating form of understanding which cannot conceive

of system or organization except by eliminating the idea of being or existence. Elsewhere, I have

tried to show that the idea of self-organization is productive of being and existence (Morin, 1977,

pp. 211-215). This is of capital importance and is opposed to two types of thinking: one which

can function only by obscuring concrete beings and existents (condemning itself to see only their

skeletons, and in so doing condemning them to manipulations of every description); and the

other one which can function only by revealing and focusing on the reality of existing beings

(which is obviously of the utmost importance when dealing with living things in general, and

with human beings in particular).

Thus, we see that a new knowledge of organization is capable of creating a new

organization of knowledge. The old reductionist and atomistic paradigm, in which order was the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 162

only explanatory principle, is replaced by a new paradigm consisting of interrelations (which are

necessarily associative in nature) among the notions shown in Figure 21.

Instead of the old, solitary master-word, we now have a macroconcept which not only is

molar in nature, but also contains circular relations between its terms-in other words, a macro-

concept that is recursive.

C. The Psychophysical Nature of the System Paradigm

The paradigm of simplification requires us to choose between two ontological views of systems:

(1) either the system is a real physical category which imposes itself naturally on the perception

of the observer, who must then take care to "reflect" it correctly in his or her

[Insert Figure 21]

description, or (2) the system is a mental category or ideal model, merely heuristic or pragmatic

in nature, which is applied to phenomena in order to control, to master, or to "model" them.

The complex conception of system cannot allow itself to be trapped within this alterna-

tive. System is a double-entry concept: [Insert Figure 22]. It is a chimera concept: a psychical

head on a physical body. It is as described in Figure 23.

And the following principles flow from the relations indicated in Figure 23:

 a principle of art (diagnostic principle);

 a principle of critical reflection (on the relativity of system concepts and frontiers); and

 an uncertainty principle.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 163

The fact that the psychical and the physical nature of system are indissociable also entails the

indissociability of the relation between the observer/subject and the observed/object. This leads

to the necessity of including, not excluding, the observer in the observation.

This, in turn, leads to the necessity of elaborating a meta-system of understanding in which

the system of observation/perception/conception is itself observed/perceived/conceived within

the observation/perception/conception of the observed system. This, then, sets in motion a series

of consequences which lead to the complexification of our very mode of perceiving/conceiving

the phenomenal world. Whence the necessity for an even more significant paradigmatic and

epistemological reform than the one we have envisioned up to this point, since the connection

between the knowledge of organization and the organization of knowledge demands a

reorganization of the process of knowing. This can be done by introducing a second-order

reflection-that is, a knowing of knowing.

By the same token, the radical dissociation between the sciences of physis and the sciences

of the mind-that is, between the sciences of nature and the sciences of culture, or the biophysical

sciences and the anthropo-social sciences-appears to us as an ongoing

[Insert Figure 23]

mutilation and an obstacle to any serious knowledge. If the ambition to reconnect these

disjointed sciences seems absurd, to accept this disjunction would be even more so. Therefore, if

we are not yet capable of accomplishing this reconnection, we must at least bring into face-to-

face contact:

• the observer with the observed system;

• the subject with the object; and
• culture (which with physis (which produces
produces physical biological organization
science) which produces anthroposocial
organization, and hence culture).
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 164

In this way the process of distinguishing, which is fundamental to all cognitive acts,

becomes complex. It appears to us as the result of a transaction between the observer and the

world that is observed-a transaction in which either one of the participants can very well deceive

the other one. In any event, this process takes place within a given culture (which provides the

paradigms which permit and require distinguishing), and thus involves, among its other aspects,

an ideological component. If science cannot be reduced to ideology (that is, if science cannot be

viewed solely as the ideological product of a given society), one must nevertheless acknowledge

the ideological component in all scientific knowledge. Scientific knowledge cannot be spared

from ideological critique, and thus from self-knowledge-and that also applies to those who think

they possess the true science and denounce the ideology of others.

D. The Paradigm of Complexity

In all of the preceding discussion, the fundamental term in need of clarification was complexity.

What is recognized as complex is most often the complicated, the entangled, and the confused,

and thus something that cannot be described, given the astronomical number of measurements,

operations, computations, and so forth such a description would require. However, those who

recognize this complexity at the level of phenomena generally share the belief that it can be

explained at a fundamental1evel in terms of a few simple principles that allow for an almost

infinite combination of a few equally simple elements.

In this way, for instance, the extreme complexity of speech can be explained by means of

structural principles allowing for the combination of phonemes and words. Similarly, the

discovery of a double-helix structure allowing for combinations based on a four-letter chemical

alphabet is thought to have revealed the key to living organization.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 165

Certainly, such explanations are of immense import; for example, they allow us to

understand at one and the same time the unity and the diversity of complex phenomena (like

human language or the language of life). However, by no means do they exhaust the problem of

explanation. Structural linguistics does not explain the meaning of speech, any more than the

genetic code explains the various existing phenomena-this cluster of emergent qualities-we call

life. To be sure, since molecular biology has explained the chemical machinery of life (although

not life itself), it has come to regard life as a mythological notion (or in any event as unworthy of

science), and so has banished life from biology. But what it ought to do is just the reverse: reflect

on the inadequacy of all explanatory principles based on simplification. Complexity is not

merely the phenomenal froth of reality; it is in the principles themselves.

The physical foundation of what we call reality is not simple, but rather complex. The

atom is not simple. Even the so-called elementary particle is not a simple primary entity: it

oscillates between being and non-being-between wave and particle-and it may itself contain

components which by their very nature cannot be isolated (quarks). At the macrocosmic level,

the universe is no longer the ordered sphere dreamed of by Laplace. It is both dissipation and

crystallization, both disintegration and organization. Uncertainty, indeterminacy, randomness,

and contradictions appear, not as residues to be eliminated by explanation, but as ineliminable

ingredients of our perception/conception of reality-thus spelling ruin for simplification as an

explanatory principle. From now on, all of these ingredients must nourish the elaboration of a

principle of complex explanation.

Complexity cannot be simplified-that is the moral of the system paradigm. It is complex

because it forces us to unite ideas which are mutually exclusive within the framework of the

principle of simplification/reduction (see Figure 24).

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 166

It is complex because it establishes mutual implication-and therefore necessary

conjunction-between notions which that classically disjunct (see Figure 25).

It is complex because it introduces a complex concept of causality-in particular, the idea

of an eco-auto-causality. (The notion of auto-causality-which always requires an external

causality-is synonymous with recursive causality-in which the organizing process elaborates the

products, actions, and effects necessary for its own generation or regeneration.)

[Insert Figure 24]

[Insert Figure 25]

Systemized Theories
System is better understood as a generic, rather than a general, concept. It is generic to a new

way of thinking which can then be applied in a general fashion. But in order to be applied in a

general fashion, it has no need of a general theory of systems. Rather, the organization/system

dimension should be present in all theories bearing upon the physical universe (including the

biological, the anthroposocial, and the noological realms). If these theories were considered as so

many branches of a general theory of systems, they would reduce the diverse phenomena

perceived to the system dimension alone. By contrast, what is required is a differentiation among

theories bearing upon types of phenomena with each having its own nature (that is, each of

which has a physics, a chemistry, and a thermodynamics-thus an organization, a being, and an

existence-peculiar to itself).

Moreover, General System Theory, which is founded solely on the notion of the open

system, is wholly insufficient when applied to living or social systems. What we must do, then, is

reconsider our physical, biological, and anthropo-social theories so as to deepen their

system/organization dimension and to uncover their connections with (a) the key concepts of
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 167

organization, and (b) a way of thinking capable of creating a dynamic feedback loop among

terms which are simultaneously complementary, competitive, and antagonistic.

Otherwise, we will fall back into the same old vices of reduction, homogenization, and

abstraction that system theory claimed to cure.

Conclusions
1. System is not a master-word for totality; rather, it is a root-word for complexity.

2. We have to raise the concept of system from the theoretical level to the paradigmatic

level (I could say as much, if not more, about the cybernetic concept of machine-

everything said here about the idea of system is valid a fortiori for the idea of machine).3

3. The problem is not to create a general theory covering everything from atoms, molecules,

and stars to cells, organisms, artifacts, and society. Rather, the problem is to consider

atoms, stars, cells, artifacts, and society-that is to say, all aspects of reality, including, and

in particular, our own-in a richer way in the light of the complexity of system and

organization.

4. Under the reign of the paradigm of simplification/disjunction, being, existence, and life

dissolve into the abstraction of system, which then becomes the successor to all the

abstractions, obscuring the richness of reality and provoking its unbridled manipulation.

In contrast, the inevitable effect of the development of a complex concept of

system/organization will be to cause being, existence, and life to emerge once more.

5. In other words, as long as the idea of system remains at the level of theory, it in no way

affects the paradigm of disjunction/simplification. System theory thought it had

overcome this paradigm (just as it thought it had overcome the atomization of

reductionism); on the contrary, however, its "holism" becomes a new kind of

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 168

reductionism by reducing everything to the whole. Only at the paradigmatic level-where

the true extent of a system's potential complexity can be revealed-will the idea of system

be able to open out onto a new complex organization of thought and action.

6. We begin to catch a glimpse of a new form of rationality. The old rationality was content

to fish for order in the sea of nature. But it caught no fish--only fishbones! By allowing us

to conceive of organization and existence, the new rationality allows us to perceive not

only the fish, but the ocean as well-that is to say, that which can never be caught.

7. The old rationality organized on the basis of order (that is, through the act of ordering).

The new rationality, however, orders on the basis of organization (that is, the play of

interactions between the parts involved and the whole). In this sense, organizing must

replace ordering. The more complex the organization, the more it harbors those forms of

disorder we call freedom.

8. Organization is not an institution, but a continually generative and regenerative activity at

all levels based on computation, strategic planning, communication, and dialogue.

9. The system paradigm demands that we master, not nature, but the desire for mastery (as

Michel Serres has urged),4 which opens up for us forms of action which necessarily

entail self-consciousness and self-control.

10. Such a principle leads to a praxis that is at once responsible, liberal, libertarian, and

communitarian (each of these terms being transformed through its interactions with the

others). It also leads to the rediscovery of the problem of wisdom and the necessity of

establishing our own form of wisdom. This is the sense in which the search for new

wisdom must be an effort to overcome the split that has occurred in the West between the

world of reflection and the world of social praxis.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 169

Notes
1. This paper, titled "Le système, paradigme ou théorie?," was first read as the inaugural

address to the Congrès de I'A.F.C.E.T., Versailles, November 21, 1977. It was published in

Science avec conscience, Paris: Fayard, 1982, pp. 172-189; and reprinted in Science avec

conscience, new edition, Paris: Points/Seuil, 1990, pp. 238-255. Reprinted from Journal of

Social and Evolutionary Systems, 15 /4, Morin, E. From the concept of a system to the

paradigm of complexity, 371-385., Copyright (1992), with permission from Elsevier.

2. Cf.: "We foresee the possibility of transforming vicious circles into virtuous cycles which

become reflexive and begin to generate complex thinking" (Morin, 1977, p. 19).

3. See Morin, 1977, pp. 255-282.

4. See Serres, 1982, esp. Chapter 2, "Knowledge in the Classical Age: La Fontaine and Des-

cartes," pp. 15-28.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 170

References
Beer, S. (1960). "Below the twilight arch: A mythology of systems." General systems: Yearbook

of the society for general systems research, 5, 9-20.

Gunther, G. (1962). "Cybernetic ontology and transjunctional operations," in Yovits, M. C.

Jacobi, G. T., & Goldstein, G. D., (eds.) Self-organizing systems (pp. 313-392).

Washington, DC: Spartan Books.

Morin, E. (1977). La Méthode 1, La nature de la nature, (Method. 1. The nature of nature).

Paris: Seui1.

Pascal, B. (1966 [1662]). Pensées. Krailsheimer, A. J., (trans.). London: Penguin Books. (Pascal

worked on the Pensées until his death in 1662; they were first published in 1670. The

arrangement of the Pensées by Léon Brunschvicg, available in Le Livre de Poche and

numerous other editions, is standard.)

Serres, M. (1982). Hermes: Literature. science, philosophy. Harari, J. V. & Bell, D. F., (eds.)m

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. (Translations of texts drawn from Hermès.

Vols. I-V. Paris: Minuit, 1968-1980, and other sources.)

Spencer Brown, G. (1972). Laws of form. New York: Julian Press. (Originally published:

London: Allen and Unwin, 1969.)

Suggestions for Further Reading

Bougnoux. D., Le Moigne. J. L., and Proulx, S., (Eds.) (1990). Arguments pour une méthode:

Autour d'Edgar Morin. Paris: Seuil. (Morin volume in the prestigious Colloque de Cerisy

series)

Kelly, S. (1988). "Hegel and Morin: The science of wisdom and the wisdom of the new science,"

The owl of minerva, 20 (1), Fall, 51-67. (Morin as heir to Hegel and as exponent of the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 171

new sciences of complexity)

Morin, E. (1977-1991). La méthode. 4 vols. Paris: Seuil. (Vol. I. La nature de la nature, 1977;

Vol. 2. La vie de la vie, 1980; Vol. 3, La connaissance de la connaissance, 1986; Vol. 4.

Les idées: Leur habitat, leur vie, leurs moeurs, leur organisation, 1991.) (Morin's

magnum opus).

Morin, E. (1990). Science avec conscience. New ed. Paris: Points/Seuil. (Originally published:

Paris: Fayard, 1982.) (Collected essays)

Morin, E. (1990). Introduction à la pensée complexe. Paris: ESF. (accessible summary statement

of Morin's philosophy of complexity).

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 172

Chapter 5: Complex Thinking for a Complex World:

About Reductionism, Disjunction and Systemism
When thinking about systems, the first thing to note is that systems are complex. They are

complex in several senses. First, systems include many connections between parts that appear as

separate entities when viewed from the perspective of the classical scientific disciplines. Second,

the system is a unity even though it is comprised of a diversity of parts. Thus we have the

primary definition of the complexity of a system, given by Ashby as being a measure of the

diversity of parts within the system. This was the first important definition of complexity in the

field of science.

However, I maintain that a system is also complex in a logical sense, because when you

look at a complex problem you immediately see the limits of classical logic, because we can see

that the system is, at the same time, both more and less than the sum of its parts.

The claim that a system is more than the sum of its parts is very well known, and indeed

was already made by Aristotle, and it encapsulates a very interesting point, namely that a system

has certain qualities and properties that we cannot find in the parts by themselves. These

qualities come from the organization of the system.

However, the system is also less than the sum of its parts, in the sense that it imposes

constraints on the behavior of the parts, so that some qualities or properties of the parts cannot be

expressed. This phenomenon is especially evident is social systems: as individuals we have many

qualities and potentials that present us with many possibilities for behavior which we cannot exhibit

because of constraints, due to socially determined laws or inhibitions due to group norms. Such

phenomena take us beyond the limits of classical logic because here the terms "more" or "less" can

only be used in a metaphorical sense. In this case the term "more" signifies the existence of new
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 173

qualities that we designate by the term "emergence". It is interesting that in this case these emergent

qualities cannot be inferred from an examination of the different parts — we cannot deduce them but

only observe and characterise them at the level of the system. This confounds the powers of

deductive logic.

In my view the systems concept provides us with the essential insight needed for gaining

knowledge of complex phenomena, in the sense that when we begin to look at classical science

from a critical perspective; we see that the "objects" studied by science, and treated by science

simply as objects in fact are all systems. For example, molecules are systems of atoms and

atoms are systems of particles. The fundamental particles also can only be understood from a

systems perspective. They are usually presented to us as logically paradoxical objects, having

mutually contradictory properties such as being both corpusclar and wave-like. However, this

problem arises because the classical perspective does not take account of the systemic context of

the object. Classical science is based on the two principles of disjunction and reduction.

"Disjunction" is an investigatory principle whereby objects are divided into more basic things and

the specialized disciplines study objects at every level of separation without regard for the

connection between them. In this approach it is virtually impossible to see the object in a way that

preserves its connection to its environmental context. We cannot understand the significance of

the context when we have removed the context! It means something very different to be called

"darling" by your wife in your home, and to be called "darling" by a prostitute in the street — the

different contexts change the meaning completely. For this reason we have to take as a fundamental

principle when dealing with complexity that we have to take account of the connections between

things, so we take proper account of the significance of contexts.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 174

In my view present-day classical science is in crisis in many areas, with apparently intractable

problems in fields such as fundamental physics, cosmology, biology and so on, but people have a

mind-set which makes it very difficult for them to look at things in a new way, and to change to a

different paradigm. The crisis of classical science began with the breakdown of the great

principle of universal determination. This breakdown is provoked in the 18th century by the

second law of thermodynamics. This law implies the existence of irreversible processes, and this

introduces a time-element in physics. Before this it was thought that processes are always

reversible, but the second law implies that the passage of time introduces disorder that makes

deterministic prediction impossible. The behavior of atoms or molecules can now only be assessed

as a group, by using statistical methods, and not traced on the level of individuals. This law also

introduces a principle of disintegration or destruction, by implying the accumulation of disorder

over time. We see this at work everywhere in the universe. We know that the stars are

undergoing disintegration, and that our own sun will die in five billion years, and that dispersion

is occurring throughout the universe.

However, at the same time, we see in the universe processes that create organization.

Right at the beginning we had a great dispersion in the form of the "Big Bang" from which our

universe originated, and this process was so violent that neither matter nor antimatter could persist

during this time. However, despite this great dispersion, things were still connected at the quantum

level, and via processes mediated by these connections there formed firstly atoms and in due course

stars, solar systems and so on. So we see in the universe processes that produce complex matter

and complex organization, and in the case of our planet the production of the complex

organization represented by living systems.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 175

It is impossible to understand this scenario from the perspective of "disjunction", for when

things are treated separately we cannot understand why in some parts of nature we see

disintegration while in other parts we see progressive organization. But in fact these processes are a

single phenomenon — it is the interplay of ordering and disintegration that makes the development

of new kinds of organization possible. This is the great principle behind the complexity of the

universe, but it is impossible to discover this if we look only at the second law's production of

disintegration, or we look only at the production of complexity.

In this light it is interesting to consider the nature of life. Living systems represent a complex

type of organization. The organization of a living system is more complex than the organization of

the molecules of which it is composed. However, this organization is achieved using only

molecules from the physical universe — living systems are not made from something like 'living

matter', but from ordinary physical and chemical substances. "Life" is a property created through

complex self-organisation. Life is characterized by processes of self-reproduction and self-

repair, processes that involve knowledge and memory. The central feature of a living system is

the self-organizational capacity to produce and reproduce itself. However, as von Foerster noted,

calling this self-organisation is paradoxical, because the organizational processes of life require

a continuous input of energy. We need energy even when we sleep — energy to drive our

heartbeat, our digestion, our breathing. We use energy in all moments of life. However, we also

need to compensate for the dissipation of energy in line with the second law of thermodynamics,

and this means we must take in energy from the environment. We do this by ingesting material

that contains energy, and to this we need knowledge of the environment, and in particular

knowledge of the organization of the environment. So self-organisation requires an interplay

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 176

between the knowledge of how to organize the self and the knowledge of how the

environment is organized.

The significance of this is that while living beings are autonomous systems in the sense that

they maintain themselves, they are necessarily also dependent systems because they cannot self-

organize without an input of energy and matter from the environment. This is one of the logical

paradoxes of complexity, that autonomy is always accompanied by dependency. Here again we

see that complexity takes us beyond classical logic. This is an important insight because it shows

that to understand living systems and many other kinds of complex systems we have to consider

such interactive loops between the systems and the environment. This presents a deeper

understanding than just to regard the autonomy of the system as grounded in the negative

feedback loops that constrains deviations in the system within its homeostatic limits. In my view

the "separatists" assign fundamental importance to the homeostatic feedback loops in order to

eliminate linear causality and hence to establish the scientific possibility of designing autonomous

systems.

A good example is a heating system in a house that uses a feedback loop between a

thermostat and a furnace to regulate the temperature in the house. However, such interactive

loops provide a very limited kind of autonomy. A fuller kind of autonomy is provided by

recursive loops. A recursive process, in the sense at stake here, is a process where the product

produced by the process is necessary for sustaining the productive process. A living system is

like this, in that it is both the product of a process and the producer of that process. As living

systems we are both the product and the producer of the product. Societies are also like this. A

society is the product of interactions between individuals, but the society has emergent properties

that are retroactive on the individuals, and hence shape what we become as human beings, so we
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 177

are both the product and producer of the society. This notion of recursivity is important for all

processes of self - production, and significant for understanding complexity at the human level.

There are two issues at stake here. First, we are obliged to define what we mean by

"humanity" in a "trinitary" way, in terms of being spatial, an individual, and a member of

society. Just like in the example of the Holy Trinity these elements are generated in a specific

sequence, and although they are distinct they also constitute a whole in which the elements are not

fractional parts. We are not 30% each element but each one wholly. I am located in space, but there

is also space inside me, the spatial volume that I occupy. I am a member of society but I also have

society 'as a whole' inside me, existing as rules, culture and so on, so although I am in society,

society is also in me. I live in an ecosystem but there is also an ecosystem inside me. These

elements form a "trinity", each one generating the others and being regenerated by the others.

In this way a person is a perpetual recursive loop, and it is only to this that the complexity of

humanity can be reduced.

Traditional reductionism claims that we are all individuals, in society and in

ecosystems. In this perspective we are merely units inside these systems, and we are not the

connections. In contrast complexity tries to understand the type of connections that are present. And

looking at complex systems in this way reveals something interesting — not only is the part

inside the whole but the whole is inside the part. For example, each cell in my hand contains the

complete genetic code for my whole body. Some of this code is inhibited, but the whole of it is

present in each part of my body. We can call this a "holographic principle" because in a

holographic image, each part of the hologram contains a substantial portion of the total image. If

one cuts a hologram in half and projects light through the two parts, one does not get two half-

images but two complete ones. The holographic principle describes this — the whole is in each
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 178

part. The implication is that human beings have a very complex ontology, and it is important to

keep this in mind.

The definition of homo sapience is of man as a reasonable being, but this is a deficient view,

because we are also homo demens, existing in a tension between the two polarities of rationality and

madness. This madness is not something exceptional — we become mad when we are angry, or

in a state of furore. There is also the madness of the great conquerors, which the ancient

Greeks called hubris. It may also be that we are in the grip of a kind of political madness. It is

interesting that we have these two polarities, but more importantly we should recognize that we

cannot be rational in a pure way — as Damasio and others have shown, even in our most rational

intellectual moments our emotions are engaged. Even mathematicians who are doing

completely abstract work are passionate about their mathematics. It is because of emotion and

passion that we can become mad, but when we are completely coldly rational that is another

type of madness. And so we always try to create a balanced interplay between reason and

passion, while recognizing that passion is only passion and not reason.

It is also possible to define humankind as homo faber, man the tool maker, who thinks up

techniques and technologies. But this is also a deficient view because humans also have other

kinds of ideas, such as having a sense of there being a life after death, and the existence of genii and

of spirits. All societies have religions, and in my view being homo mythologicus is of central

importance for being human and for being homo faber. The capacity to make myths and to

imagine is a fundamental ability for humanity. We are not only homo economicus with a passion

for modernity and acting only in self-interest, but we also play games and write novels, we are also

homo ludens.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 179

The point is that humanity has all these possibilities. We cannot make a policy decision

that only says that humans are rational, because they can be mad as well. We cannot only say

that people are good, because they can be bad also. We need to look at both sides. Just as it is

deficient to look only on the positive aspects, we should also guard against focusing on the negatives

and just setting constraints in society, this is also a false approach. Human complexity requires a

versatile politics.

In thinking about this it is important to remember that life is more than just living. People

strive to survive but life is more than just survival — people have fundamental needs beyond

survival — needs to express themselves, to expand their capacities, to commune with each other,

and so on.

Another aspect of life that is also very interesting is that man is also a member of a species,

the human species, which is part of the primates, who are part of the mammals, who are part of

the vertebra, who are a part of all animals, animals being part of life. Western civilization has

totally forgotten the deep, vital relation between humanity and the living environment, the

biosphere, ecosystems. Perhaps this started with the Bible, because in the biblical narrative God

separates creation: he makes man in his image and the animals are totally separate. But it is

mainly the development of Western civilization in the 17th century and afterwards that makes the

great separation. Descartes says that science must make man the master of nature. For Buffon and

Marx man becomes the dominator, who can manipulate all of nature, all living beings: but he forgets

that this manipulation conducts us, finally, not only to the degradation of the biosphere, but

ultimately to our own degradation —this is the problem of our scientific civilization.

We can say that if we look at complexity, complexity's presence suggests logical paradoxes.

Heraclitus, a philosopher of the 5th century before our era, said: "living by death, dying by
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 180

life". Dying by life is self-evident, but living by death does not only mean killing in order to eat.

Now we know that our bodies are self-destructive to make room for new cells. The regeneration

of cells, the creation of new cells means that we are living through the death of cells. The

regeneration of cells ensures the continuation of life. Life, in order to fight against death, utilizes

death from within in order to be stronger in in the confrontation with death. In the end death wins

this battle, but this type of relation is very interesting.

The paradox in the physical world is also the paradox of the "separability", which goes

with inseparability. It is the same as with the wave-particle paradox. The wave-particle duality is a

paradox of microphysics, but in a similar way: we are separate as individuals, but we also emerge

from continuity: the continuity of life, of the species, of society. It is not only a paradox for

microphysics it is a general paradox. We are product and producer,we are the cause and the

effect, the effects becoming the cause, life and death. This gives a sense of the logical problem

which the reflection on complexity must confront, and it must do so in a way that I call

"dialogical". "Dialogical" means the union of two antagonistic terms in order to understand a

complex problem.

Before discussing our present situation, I want to say that complexity is, finally, not only

what we encounter when we try to understand the world, to understand life, to understand

ourselves. Complexity is also a mode of knowledge when we integrate certain principles: the

principle of retroactivity, of connectivity, in a dialogical principle. It is a way of thinking. I am

amazed by how researchers go about investigating complex systems. They study complex systems

with uncertainty, randomness, chaos theory, but they don't change their mind, they don't change

the structure of their worldview, but in fact they need to undergo a paradigmatic change.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 181

I want to make one more point before considering our current situation. One must consider

the ecology of action. What does this mean? When we decide upon an action the action often does

not fulfill our intent because it enters in a play of interactions, retroactions and so on. The way

things turn out can be completely contrary to what was expected. History is replete with

examples of this. As you know, the French revolution had its prelude in an aristocratic reaction,

based on the intent to recuperate powers lost during the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV. It begins

with the provocation of the Estates General of 1789, where the king preserves the majority for

himself, the church and aristocracy. In 1789 the third estate imposes a decision to vote by head-

count instead, and this totally changed the majority.

Another example shows that even Hitler's decisions led to outcomes that were contrary to

his intent. Likewise, the Soviet Revolution eventually led to results that were contrary to its

intentions. The challenge is always to do with the ecology of actions. But what can we do?

Sometimes we are obliged to take a decision, because not to take a decision is also a type of

decision. It is like the abstention of a vote: it is an action. This means that each decision contains

a measure of uncertainty about what the consequences will be. In French we say "un part', a

wager. It is important to understand the limits of the power of human decision-making and

control. Even in the case of the most determinate strategies, we have limitations in our capacity

to follow and correct the trajectory of a decision and even perhaps of preventing a negative

reaction to a decision.

Finally, today we are in the system Earth. This system is a physical system, a biological system,

a human system: the spheres are very imbricated. It is evident that in terms of the evolution of life,

we are in the "Anthropocene", in the period where humankind's actions are the dominant influence

on the evolution of humankind. As a system Earth is both closed and open: it is open to the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 182

solar system and galaxy, and life depends on the rays of light coming from the sun. It is also

closed due to the restrictions of the atmosphere and the stratosphere. It is always the same logical

problem. Some people call this "the theory of open systems", after Bertalanffy. His theory is

very astute. We have to be open, in order to receive and to give to the environment, but it is also

necessary to be closed in order to preserve the integrity and the uniqueness of the system. The

frontier is at the same time the point of closure and of communication.

If we look at human evolution from this perspective, we see, leading to the

Anthropocene and starting in the 15th century, the beginning of what we can call the

"planetarian" epoch. It is nowadays called globalization, but it is better called "planetarian", because

it connects all the parts of the earth, through colonization, slavery and so on. Today the system is

exhibiting a very widespread process of development, a process of development of technology,

science, economics, and so on, but it is ungoverned, without control, without limitation. And it is

a great positive feedback, because science and technology today engenders the multiplication of

nuclear bombs, without constraints. An economy without regulation goes from crisis to crisis, leading

to the development of human antagonism and fanaticism. It is very interesting to note that this

development is not only material and technical, but is the development of human madness, in

the sense of fanaticism, of the human unconsciousness.

I remember when I was young: ten years before the Second World War all politicians

were somnambulists, going through the world without the slightest awareness of the war that was

about to occur. Madness, unawareness, productivity, and destruction of the biosphere: we are

stuck with a series of catastrophes, and we cannot predict them. However, if we do not find a way

to regulate ourselves, to change the path we are on, the number of catastrophes will become more

frequent. At the point of the system we call `singularity', the globalized earth system will be
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 183

unable to deal with its fundamental problems, its mortal or living problems. It will be unable to

treat the problem of the degradation of the biosphere, unable to treat the problem of the

multiplication of atomic bombs, unable to treat the non-regulation of the economy and the

domination of financial speculation. It will be unable to control the phenomenon of madness, of

fanaticism in the current world. When a system is unable to treat its fundamental problems, either the

system disintegrates or the system regresses and becomes even more barbarian than it already is.

However, there is also the possibility that the system will be able to produce a meta-

system, a system with new properties with the capacity to treat these vital and mortal problems. The

problem is to know whether we have the possibility of bringing about that metamorphosis. The

concept of metamorphosis is very interesting, because it implies continuity and transformation. A

caterpillar can become a chrysalis from which emerges something new, something that has wings.

Metamorphosis is not only a phenomenon for insects, like butterflies, but al a historical

phenomenon of human societies: in the Middle Ages society was metamorphosed into the

Modern society via wars, transformations, destructions and so on. It is not impossible that a

metamorphosis to a new type of society will take place again, but it seems very unlikely: we

have to change our direction, but we are going at such a great velocity, it seems impossible to

change.

And yet, when we consider the great historical changes of the past, all of them seemed

impossible. Religious change for example: one began with the idea of a prince, the Buddha, with a

new way of thinking about personal existence, about the life of the ruler, and it became a great

religion. In contrast Jesus Christ was isolated and crucified but still we have this stupendous

deviation within the Jewish world and the Roman Empire that became a great revolution within

four centuries. Islam developed in the same way: Mohammed was rejected by Mecca and exiled to
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 184

be a refugee in Medina, and yet Islam became a great religion. Likewise democracy began in a

small city in Greece, Athens, which was destroyed several times, and yet today democracy is a

general ambition in the world. Similarly for ideas like Capitalism and Socialism which became

great movements for the best or for the worst in the twentieth century. All the great beginnings

seemed so unlikely at the outset.

In the light of this, I think today one cannot think that it is impossible that society can

metamorphose again. Maybe the beginning is more diffuse, we don't know. But there is a

possibility, even if it is improbable. Very improbable events have occurred quite frequently in

human history, and so even if what is probable for humanity is very bad, we still have the

possibility of the improbable, and for the possibility of hope in the improbable.

To conclude, I give you an interesting historical example of an improbable outcome coming

to pass. It was probable, in September of 1941, the autumn of 1941, that Hitler and the German

army would invade the Soviet Union, take millions of prisoners at Leningrad, and finally arrive

at the doors of Moscow and take Moscow. But what happened was the deeply unexpected: the

German army was immobilized at the doors of Moscow by a premature onset of winter. But, as

you probably know, Hitler had planned to attack in May 1941, but postponed it. The reason for

this was Mussolini, the Italian dictator, was in great difficulty in Greece where the little Greek

army had repelled the great Italian army. Mussolini called Hitler for help and Hitler's army had to

pass by Yugoslavia to render aid, but the resistance of Serbians cost Hitler a month: that's how long

it took him in order to destroy the Serbian resistance. If Hitler had stood by his decision to attack in

May he would have taken Moscow, but there was also another confounding element. Stalin's

great informer, Sorge, who was in Japan, told Stalin that Japan wouldn't attack Siberia, because

Japan was planning to attack the United States in the Pacific. For Stalin this meant he could take
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 185

the army off the East to put it in front of Moscow. He designated a good general, (because the

other generals were only courtesan generals, really very poor generals), Zhukov, to the front of

Moscow. On the 4th of December Zhukov attacked and repelled the German army by 200km. It

was Hitler's first defeat and the first victory of the Soviet Union. But they could not have done this

unless Japan had planned to attack Pearl Harbour. Of course that attack meant that the United

States would enter the war.

This means that in the space of two days the probability of the great victory of the century,

of the establishment of the Hitlerian empire, becomes improbable and the great improbability of a

victory for the other Europeans begins to be probable. You know history is not written. It is not, as

the Islamic saying goes "mektum". It is not like that. We are in an epoch of great uncertainty, but,

I repeat, with the possibility of hope: hope does not mean certainty; hope maintains confidence,

because hope opens up possibilities.

Note
Reprinted from Systema, 2 (1), Morin, E. Complex thinking for a complex world: About

reductionism, disjunction and systemism. 14-22., Copyright (2014), with permission from

Systema.
Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 186
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 187

Chapter 6: The Concept of System

Translation by Sean M. Kelly

Objects give way to systems. Instead of essences and substances, organization; instead of simple

and elementary units, complex unities; instead of aggregates forming bodies, systems of systems

of systems. The object is no longer a form—essence or a matter—substance. There is no longer a

form-mould which sculpts the identity of the object from the outside. The idea of form is

preserved, yet transformed; form is the totality of organized complex unity which manifest itself

phenomenally as whole in time and space; Gestalts form between elements of internal

organization, of the conditions, pressures, and constraints of the environment. Form is no longer

conceived in terms of essence, but in terms of existence and organization. Likewise, materiality

is no longer reducible to the idea of substance enclosed within form. But materiality has not

thereby vanished; it has enriched itself in its dereification: all systems are constituted by physical

elements and processes. The idea of organized matter only becomes fully intelligible within the

more complex idea of self-organizing physis.

Thus the Aristotelian model (form/substance) and the Cartesian model (simplifiable and

decomposable objects—both subjacent to our conception of objects—do not provide the

system’s principles of intelligibility. The system can neither be grasped as pure unity of

intelligibility. The system can neither be grasped as pure unity nor as absolute identity, nor as

decomposable composite. We need a systemic concept which expresses at once unity,

multiplicity, totality, diversity, organization, and complexity.

1. Beyond holism and reductionism: the relational circuit

We have already said and it bears repeating: neither the description nor the explanation of a

system can take place at the level of parts, conceived as isolated entities, linked merely by
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 188

actions and reactions. Because the compositional rules of the system are not additive, but

transformative, analytic decomposition into elements decomposes the system in the process.

Also, the reductionistic explanation of a complex whole in terms of its simple elements

disarticulates, disorganizes, simplifies, and, in the final analysis, destroys that which makes up

the reality of the system itself: articulation, organization, complex unity. It ignores the

transformations effected on the parts; it ignores the whole as whole, emergent qualities (which

are conceived as the simple effects of combined actions), as well as latent or virulent

antagonisms. Atlan’s remark concerning living organisms applies to all systems: “The simple

fact of analyzing an organism according to its constituent elements entails a loss of information

about that organism” (Atlan, 1972, p. 262).

It is not a question of underestimating the resounding successes of the reductionistic

perspective; the search for the basic element led to the discovery of the molecule, then the atom,

then the particle, etc. The search for manipulable units and verifiable effects permitted, in fact,

the manipulation of all systems through manipulation of their elements. In the process, however,

a shadow was cast over organization, and obscurity was cast over complexity. In the end, the

elucidations of reductionistic science were paved by obscurantism. Systems theory reacted to

reductionism with its idea of the whole, but believing it had surpassed reductionism, its “holism”

merely brought about a reduction to the whole: from which arose not only its blindness to the

parts as parts, but its myopia with respect to organization as organization, and its ignorance of

the complexity at the heart of any global unity.

In either case, reductionistic or “holist” explanation seeks to simplify the problem of

complex unity. The one reduces explanation of the whole to the properties of the parts conceived

in isolation. The other reduces the properties of the parts to the properties of the whole, also
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 189

conceived in isolation. These two mutually repelling, explanations each arise out of the same

paradigm.

The conception that is revealed here places us at once beyond reductionism and holism,

and summons a principle of intelligibility that integrates the portion of truth included in each;

there should neither be annihilation of the whole by the parts nor of the parts by the whole. It is

essential, therefore, to clarify the relations between parts and whole, where each term refers back

to the other: “I consider it as impossible,” said Pascal, “…to know the parts without knowing the

whole, as to know the whole without a precise knowledge of the parts.” In the twentieth century,

reductionistic and holist ideas still do not measure up to the level of such a formulation.

The truth of the matter is that, even more than mutually referring to one another, the

interrelation which links explanation of the parts to that of the whole, and vice versa, is an

invitation to recursive description and explanation; that is description (explanation) of the parts

depends upon that of the whole, which depends upon that of the parts, and it is in the circuit that

the description of explanation constitutes itself.

Insert Figure 26

This signifies that neither one of the two terms is reducible to the other. Thus, if the parts

must be conceived in function of the whole, they must also be conceived in isolation: a part has

its proper irreducibility in relation to the system. It is necessary, moreover, to know the qualities

or properties of the parts that are inhibited, virtualized, and, therefore, invisible at the heart of the

system, not only correctly to understand the parts, but also to better understand the constraints,

inhibitions, and transformations effected by the organization of the whole.

It is equally essential to move beyond the purely globalizing and enveloping idea of the

whole. The whole is not just emergence. It has, as we shall see, a complex face, and here the idea
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 190

of a macroscope (de Rosnay, 1975), or a conceptual point of view, which allows us to perceive,

recognize, and describe global forms, becomes indispensable.

The explanatory circuit whole/parts cannot, as we have just seen, do away with the idea

of organization. It must, therefore, be enriched as follows:

Insert Figure 27

Elements must be defined at once according to their original characteristics, the

interrelations in which they participate, the perspective of the organization in which they operate,

and the perspective of the whole in which they are integrated. Conversely, organization must

define itself in relation to the elements, the interrelations, the whole, and so forth. The circuit is

polyrelational. In this circuit, organization plays a nuclearizing role with which we shall have to

come to terms.

2. The whole is not all

Scissions in the whole (the Immersed and the Emergent, the Repressed and the

Expressed).

Although emergents blossom as the phenomenal qualities of systems, organizational constraints

immerse in a world of silence the characteristics which are inhibited, repressed, and compressed

at the level of the parts. Thus all systems comprise an immersed, hidden and obscure zone,

teeming with stifled potentialities. The duality between the immersed and the emergent, the

potential and the actual, the repressed and the expressed, is the source in the great living and

social polysystems, of scissions and dissociations between the sphere of the parts and that of the

whole. The Freudian idea of the psychic unconscious, and the Marxist idea of the social

unconscious, each reveal the bottomless pit hitherto concealed in the notions of identity and

totality. The problem of the unconscious has its source —though only its source, for, as we shall
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 191

see, it is not a question here of reducing everything to systemic terms—this profound scission

between the parts and the whole, between the world of the internal and that of the external.

In our own fashion, we recognize this duality when we distinguish between “structure”

and “form” within a system. Our traditional logic, for its part, tends to reduce phenomenal

characteristics, conceived as simple effects, to structural characteristics.

It is thus perfectly understandable that in considering social or biological systems in light

of the relation infra/superstructure, one of the terms tends to be ignored or forgotten. Such

ignorance can only be overcome through a recognition of the indissoluble solidarity that exists

between both terms. We must, therefore, seek to understand the biological and sociological

complexity of systems which, while remaining fundamentally unitary, comprise several levels of

organization and existence through which such systems become equally multiple, dissociated,

and, at the limit, inwardly antagonistic.

The Insufficient Whole

There are black holes in every totality—blind spots, zones of shadow, and ruptures. Totalities

harbor internal divisions which are not merely the divisions between its distinguishable parts.

There are scissions which are potential sources of conflict and separation. It is extremely difficult

to grasp the idea of totality in a world dominated by reductionistic simplification. And once

grasped, it would be ridiculous to conceive of it in a simplified and euphoric manner. The true

totality is always fissured and incomplete. The true conception of totality recognizes the

insufficiency of the totality. This is the great advance of Adorno over Hegel: “The totality is the

non-truth.”

The Uncertain Whole

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 192

Finally—and I shall return to this idea from another angle—the whole is uncertain. It is uncertain

because we can isolate only with great difficulty, and can never truly close off, a system from the

systems of systems of systems to which it is linked and where it may appear at once as Koestler

has done well to indicate, as whole and part of a larger whole. It is uncertain for systems of high

biological complexity with regard to the relation of individual/species, and especially for homo

sapiens—that trisystemic monster—which involves the interrelations and interactions between

species, individual, and society. Where, in this case, is the whole? The answer cannot but be

ambiguous, multiple, and uncertain. One can assuredly look upon society as whole and the

individual as part. But one can also conceive of the individual as the central system and society

as its ecosystem, its organizer-placenta, and this even more so as consciousness emerges at the

level of the individual and not the social whole. Likewise, we can invert the hierarchy

species/individual as concrete whole, the species being nothing more than a mechanical cycle for

the reproduction of individuals. The matter is not easily settled. In fact, one must, not only out of

prudence but also out of the sense of complexity, understand that these terms finalize one

another, refer back to one another in a circuit which itself is the “true” system:

Insert Figure 28

But such a system is a multiple totality, a polytotality, the three inseparable terms that are

at the same time concurrent and antagonistic.

It follows that at certain moments, from certain angles and in certain cases, the part can

be richer than the totality. While a simplifying holism favors all totalities over its elements, we

know that, henceforth, we need not necessarily favor all totalities over the components. We

should consider the cost of the constraints on global emergents, and we should ask ourselves if

these constraints do not annihilate the possibility of even richer emergents at the level of
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 193

components. “The most profitable control system for the parts should not exclude the bankruptcy

of the whole,” (Beer, 1960, p. 16). The bankruptcy of imperial mega-systems might allow for the

constitution of polycentric federal systems.

Finally, we need not favor the totality of totalities. What is the cosmos if not a totality in

polycentric dispersion, the riches of which are disseminated into small archipelagos? It well

seems that “small parts of the universe have a reflexive capacity larger than the whole,”

(Guenther, 1962, p. 383). It even seems, as Spencer Brown has suggested, that the capacity to

reflect could only come about in a small, semi-detached part of the whole, thanks to the virtue

and the vice of its remoteness, its distance, its open finitude with respect to the totality, (Brown,

1969). Consequently, it is again evident that the point of view of the totality by itself is partial

and mutilating. Not only is the whole the “non-truth”—the truth of the whole is actual as

concrete individuality. The idea of totality becomes all the more beautiful and rich the more it

ceases being totalitarian, the more it becomes incapable of being self-enclosed, the more it

becomes complex. It is more radiant in the polycentrism of relatively autonomous parts than in

the globalism of the whole.

3. Beyond formalism and realism: from Physis to understanding,

from understanding to Physis; the subject/system and the
object/system
The notion of system is subject to a double pressure. On one hand, a smug realism considers the

notion of system to be a reflection of the real characteristics of an empirical object, while on the

other, formalism looks upon the system as an ideal model to be applied heuristically to

phenomena without prejudging their reality.

The reader is faced here with a fundamental problem associated with all phenomena and

physical objects perceived and conceived by the human mind. In a sense, all descriptions upon
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 194

which diverse observers agree refer to an objective reality. However, by the same token, the

common description is related to the mental and logical categories and the perceptual structures

without which there could be no description. This problem—the problem of the knowing of

knowing—is treated at length in Volume III of La Méthode. Nevertheless, we can already insert

the notion of system, not within the alternative realism/formalism, but in a perspective where

both terms are related to one another in a manner which is at once complementary, concurrent,

and antagonistic.

The Rootedness in Physis

All systems, including those which we isolate abstractly and arbitrarily from the sets of which

they form a part (like the atom, which is otherwise a partially ideal object, or like the molecule)

are necessarily rooted in physis.

Conditions of formation and existence are physical: gravitational and electro-magnetic

interactions; topological properties of forms; ecological conjunctures; energetic immobilizations

and/or mobilizations. “A system cannot but be energetic,” as Lupasco says; which is another way

of saying: a system is necessarily physical. An ideal system, like the one I am in the process of

elaborating, pays its tribute in energy, provokes electrochemical modifications in my brain,

corresponds to the stabilizing and morphogenetic properties of neural networks and so on..

Finally, the insertion of the notion of emergence at the very heart of the theory of the

system implies a rootedness that is non-reducible and non-deducible, that what, in that physical

perception, resists our understanding and our rationalization. That is to say, it makes a rootedness

in that aspect of the real that finds itself at the antipodes of the ideal.

There is, therefore, in the theory of the system that that I am outlining something that is

irreducibly linked at all levels to physical phenomenality: from below (originary interactions and
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 195

the interrelations that maintain the system), from the periphery (the physical thresholds of

existence beyond which the system disintegrates and transforms itself), and from above

(emergents).

The System is a Mental Abstraction

Just as all systems escape, from one angle or another, mind of the observer to reveal their

rootedness in physis, so all systems, even those two that seem phenomenally most evident—such

as machines or organisms—reveal the activity of the mind insofar as the isolation of the system

along with its concept are the result of abstractions effected by the mind of the observer/

conceptualizer.

Ashby has remarked that “objects can display an infinity of systems of equal plausibility,

distinct from one another according their properties” (Ashby, 1956, p. 274). When I ask, “What

am I?” I can conceive of myself as a physical system consisting of billions upon billions of

atoms; a biological system of some thirty billion cells; an organismic system of certain organs;

an element of my familial system, of my urban, professional, social, national, or ethnic system

etc.

To be sure, certain distinctions have been established which permit the categorization of

systems. Thus, one uses the term:

 system, for anything that manifests autonomy and emergence with respect to that

which is external to it

 sub-system, for any system that manifests subordination toward a system within

which it is integrated as a part.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 196

 suprasystem, for any system that controls other systems, without integrating them

within itself

 ego-system, for the systemic set whose interrelations constitute the environment

within which the system is encompassed

 meta-system, for the system that results from the mutually transformative and

encompassing interrelations between two previously independent systems.

In fact, however, the borders between these terms are not clearly defined. The terms

themselves are interchangeable according to the framing, cutting, or point of view adopted by the

observer of the system under consideration. The determination of systemic characteristics (sub-,

eco-,etc.) depends upon selections, interests, choices, and decisions, which themselves depend

upon the set of conditions that constitute the specific cultural and social context of the

observer/conceptualizer.

There are cases where uncertainty pervades all characterization: is society the eco-system

of the individual, or is the latter the perishable and renewable constituent of the social system? Is

the human species the super-system or the system? We cannot escape uncertainty but we can

think and conceive of the concept homo as a triadic polysystem whose terms:

Insert Figure 29

are at once complementary, concurrent, and antagonistic. This requires a theoretical construct

and a complex conception of system which recognizes the active participation of the

observer/conceptualizer.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 197

There is always, therefore, something uncertain or arbitrary in the extraction, isolation,

and definition of a system: there is always decision and choice, which introduces the category of

the subject into the concept of system.

The system requires a subject to isolate it from the polysystemic swirl, to cut it out, to

qualify and hieraiarchize it. It is doubly determined by, on one hand, a physical reality which

cannot be reduced to the human mind, and on the other, by the very structures of this mind, by

selective interests of the observer/subject along with the cultural and social context of the

scientific consciousness.

The concept of system requires the full employment of the personal qualities of the

subject in its communication with the object. It differs radically from the classical concept of the

object, which referred uniquely either to the “real” or to ideal. Systems are profoundly related to

the real. They are more real because more rooted in and linked with physis than the old quasi-

artificial object and its pseudo-realism. At the same time, they are profoundly related to the

human mind, that is to say, to the subject, which is itself immersed in culture, society, and

history. The concept of system demands a natural science that is at the same time a human

science.

Phantom Concept and Pilot Concept

In its dual nature, the system is a phantom-concept. Like the phantom, it takes on the form of

material beings; but like the phantom, it is immaterial. The system links idealism and realism,

without letting itself be trapped by the one or the other. It is neither “form,” nor “content,” nor

elements conceived in isolation, nor the whole by itself, but all of these linked in and through the

organization that transforms them. The system is a model that lets itself be modeled by the

qualities proper to phenomenality. The idea of organization is a logical simulation, but as it

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 198

comprises alogical elements (antagonisms, emergents), it is equally the reflection of what it

simulates and what it stimulates.

This is to say that the concept of system is no magic formula or some vehicle that might

transport us to the state of knowledge. It offers us no security. It must be straddled, corrected,

and guided. It is a pilot-concept, but only on condition that it is piloted.

The Subject/Object Transaction

The concept of system can only be constructed in and through the subject/object transaction, and

not through the elimination of one term by the other.

Naïve realism, which takes the system to be a real object, eliminates the problem of the

subject; naïve nominalism, which takes the system to be an ideal schema, eliminates the object.

But it also eliminates the problem of the subject, for it considers in the ideal model, not its

subjective structure, but its degree of manipulative and predictive efficiency.

In fact, however, the object, whether “real” or “ideal,” is also an object which depends

upon a subject.

Through this systemic route, the observer—excluded from classical science—and the

subject—excoriated and rejected as so much metaphysical trash—make their renetry—into the

very heart of physis. This brings us to a key idea: there is no longer a physis isolated from

humanity, which can be isolated from its understanding, its logic, its culture, and its society.

There are no objects independent of a subject.

So understood, therefore, the notion of system leads the subject not only to verify its

observation, but to integrate the same within the process of auto-observation.

Observing and Observed System

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 199

Thus the observation and study of a system must link to one another, in systemic terms. Physical

organization and the organization of ideas. The observed system—and consequently the

organized physis of which it is a part—and the observer-system—along with the anthroposocial

organization of which it is a part—become interrelated in a crucial way: the observer is as much

a part of the definition of observed system as the observed system is a part of the intellect and

culture of the observer. By and through such an interrelation, a new systemic totality is created,

which becomes the meta-system with respect to both and it admits the possibility of finding a

point of view that permits the observation of the set constituted by the observer and his or her

observation. The systemic relation between the observer and observation can be conceived in a

complex manner whereby whereby the mind of the observer/conceptualizer, his or her theory,

and more widely, his or her culture and society, are considered as so many ecosystemic

envelopes of the physical system being studied. The mental/cultural create the system under

consideration, yet it coproduces it and nourishes its relative autonomy. This is the view that I

provisionally adopt here.

We can, and indeed must, go further in the search for a meta-systemic point of view: we

can no longer escape the key epistemological problem involved in the relation between, on one

hand, the polysystemic group constituted by the subject-conceptualizer and his or her anthropo-

social rootedness, and on the other, the polysystemic group constituted by the object-system and

its physical rootedness. This would involve the elaboration of a meta-system of reference as the

locus for the intercommunication and interorganization of both groups. It is from this

perspective—both denied and forbidden by classical science—that a path is cleared for new

theoretical and epistemological development. Such development requires not only that the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 200

observer observe him or herself observing systems, but also that he or she make the effort to

know his or her knowing.

Finally, the systemic articulation established between the anthroposocial and the physical

universe, via the concept of system, suggests that the characteristic of organization is

fundamental to all systems. The possibility of articulating, in systemic terms, the organization of

physis as well as well as the organization of knowledge, implies an initial organizational

homology. This homology would permit the organizational retroaction (feedback) of our

anthroposocial understanding on the physical world out of which this understanding has emerged

through the process of evolution. Here I wish merely to stress that the theory of organization will

be of increasing concern to the organization of theory. The concept of system lends itself to

theoretical elaborations, which allow itself to be outstripped. The complex theory of the system,

in other words, transforms the theoretical system that forms it.

I hope this much is clear: it is not a question here of a Hegelian ambition to dominate the

world of systems with the System of Ideas. It is a question of an inquiry into the relation, both

hidden and extraordinary, between the organization of knowledge and the knowledge of

organization.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 201

References
Ashby ,W.R. (1956). An introduction to cyberrnetics. London: Chapman and Hal.

Atlan, H. (1972). L’Organisation biologique et le theorie de l’information. Paris: Herman.

Beer, S. (1960). Below the twilight arch. General Systems Yearbook, p. 16.

Guenther, G. (1962). Cybernetical ontology and transjunctional operations, in Self-organizing

systems. Washington, DC: Spartan Books.

Morin, E. (1977). La Methode 1 [Method, 1]. Paris: Seuil.

Needham, J. (1977). La science chinoise et l’Occident [Chinese science and the west]. Paris:

Seuil.

Maruyama, M. (1974). Paradigmatology and its applications to cross-discipinary, cross-

professional and cross-cultural-communications. Dialectica, 28, 135-196.

Spencer-Brown, J. (1969). The laws of form. London: Allen & Unwin.

Von Foerster, H. (1983). Observing systems. Seaside, CA: Intersystems Publications.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 202

Chapter 7: On the Definition of Complexity1

My introduction comprises some extremely fragmented and abstract thoughts related to the

difficulty of approaching and defining the problem of complexity.

The first difficulty stems from the fact that the problem of complexity is still considered

to be of marginal importance in scientific and epistemological thought as well as in philosophical

thought. When you examine the major discussions on epistemology by Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos,

Feyerabend, Hanson, Holton, etc., there is talk of rationality of scientificity, of non-scientificity,

but no mention of complexity. Thus, these philosophers' faithful French disciplines noted that

complexity was not in their masters' treatises and concluded that it did not exist. From the

epistemological point of view, there is; however, one notable exception, Gaston Bachelard, who

believed that complexity was a fundamental problem, since he felt that there is nothing simple

about nature, only that which is simplified. But this key idea was not further developed by

Bachelard, and it remained unexplored.

Curiously, complexity only appeared in a marginal line between engineering and science,

in the theory of systems, and in cybernetics. The first important text on complexity was written

by Warren Weaver, who wrote that the nineteenth century, the century of disorganized

complexity (he was obviously thinking of the second principle of thermodynamics), was about to

bow out to the twentieth century, which was to be the century of organized complexity. Well, in

all modesty, perhaps we should leave that for the twenty-first century. And since complexity was

only dealt with marginally or by marginal authors, such as myself, it has necessarily given rise to

fundamental misunderstandings.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 203

The first misunderstanding occurs when complexity is viewed as a panacea, an answer,

instead of as a challenge, an incentive to thought; here, complexity is believed to be an effective

substitute for simplification, which, like simplification, will enable programming and

clarification. Or else, complexity is thought of as the antithesis of order and clarity and

consequently appears to be an obstinate or depraved search for total darkness. Whereas, I stress,

the problem of complexity is first and foremost that of the effort required to face the unavoidable

challenge to our minds posed by reality.

The second misunderstanding is to confuse complexity with completeness. We say, yes,

obviously, scientific thought eliminates the non-quantifiable and only selects data which

correspond to its intelligibility. But all thought is necessarily incomplete and total exhaustive

knowledge is a mockery of an ideal.

The problem of complexity is not one of completeness, but rather of incompleteness of

knowledge. In a sense, complex thought tries to take account of what is discarded and excluded

in the mutilating type of thoughts that I call simplifiers, and thus, it combats not incompleteness,

but mutilation. For example, if we think of the fact that we are physical, biological, social,

cultural, psychic, and spiritual beings, complexity is obviously that which attempts to link or

identify these aspects by highlighting the differences between them, whereas simplified thought

either separates these different aspects or unifies them through a mutilating reduction. Thus, in

that sense, the manifest goal of complexity is to become aware of the links that are broken by

these separations between disciplines between cognitive categories and between types of

knowledge. In fact, aspiring to complexity means aiming at multi-dimensionality. It does not

imply giving all the information on an observed phenomenon, but respecting its diverse

dimensions; thus, as I have just said, we must not forget that man is a bio-socio-cultural being,
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 204

and that social phenomena are economic, cultural. Psychological, etc. Nonetheless, the core of

complex thought, while aspiring to multi-dimensionality, does contain an element of

incompleteness and uncertainty. Indeed, it can only be formulated once a radical break is made

with the idea of perfect knowledge. Once it is acknowledged that understanding is the translation

of variables received by our senses into a cerebral and spiritual language, once we realize that

there are realities in the plural, as von Foerster says, and not in the singular, once we accept the

limitations of the human mind or brain as well as the limitations that our hic et nunc culture

imposes on us, only then will we know that complex thought must include an element of

uncertainty and incompleteness. Complexity is the opposite of completeness, not its promise, as

the misguided believe. Moreover, and I shall come back to this later, complex thought integrates

the processes of simplifying thought, which are disjunctive and analytic. By no means does it

claim to provide the absolute and irrefutable truth: on the contrary, it seeks to establish a less

mutilating dialogue with reality.

Furthermore, the problem of complexity has not arisen arbitrarily, or from vicious,

tormented minds: it has been put forward by the inevitable multiple advances of modern

scientific knowledge. Very briefly, once the idea of the world as a trivial mechanical puppet

obeying the sovereign order of the laws of nature, in which chance and disorder are mere

illusions that will be dissipated through greater understanding, is abandoned, once the second

principle of thermodynamics, which is a principle of disorder, agitation, collision, and

dispersion, is generally accepted, it follows that disorder appears in the universe and complexity

is first seen as a problem of the irreducibility of disorder. But complexity does not boil down to

being merely a problem of disorder; it reappeared at the beginning of the century in quantum

physics, as the principle of uncertainty. And you are no doubt aware of the debate which raged at
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 205

the beginning of the century between classical physicists, who thought that-we were witnessing a

terrible regression of knowledge because there was a regression of generalized and absolute

determinism. Thus, a second source of complexity appears when knowledge has to negotiate and

deal with uncertainty.

A third source of complexity is to be found in the emergence of an indelible

contradiction. I believe that a decisive epistemological step forward was taken when Niels Bohr

declared that the wave and the corpuscle would have to be associated if the particle was to be

understood in physics, in spite of the logical contradiction the association of these two concepts

gave rise to. In the same way, the contradiction spread to the cosmos, when astrophysicists noted

the expansion of the universe and isotropic radiation, which seemed to be the fallout of an early

fossil explosion, and came to this completely contradictory, absurd, and yet logical idea of time

stemming from non-time, of space coming from non-space, of matter rising from a void.

Logic itself was affected by complexity, when logical proof was shaken by uncertainty in

the complex formalized systems: these are the consequences of Gödel's major theorem of

incompleteness.

Finally, the problem of complexity cropped up in organization, once it was accepted

through the theory of systems and cybernetics that organized wholes cannot be reduced to the

parts they are comprised of but have emerging properties, which themselves retroact on the

component parts. As I have said elsewhere2, the whole is both more and less than the sum of its

parts. The question of complexity arises from various areas: disorder, chance, uncertainty,

contradiction, and organization. This is where the crucial problem lies: where does complexity fit

in? On the empirical level, with phenomena? On the theoretical level? With logic? With reality?
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 206

With thought? I would like to outline what, in my opinion, is the crux of the problem of

complexity, and, incidentally, of simplification.

But before that, let me repeat what Atlan said several times, and what different speakers

here have also said: complexity must not be confused with complication or the intertwining of

myriads of inter-retroactions, even if we do feel that the very complexity of living organisms, for

example, implies an incredible complication.

Personally, I would put complexity at a level that is apparently logical, but in fact

paradigmatic. Let me first clarify the definitions. Since the word paradigm is very widely used, I

shall say that for me paradigm is the type of relations instituted between different categories or

key concepts and governs the discourse, thought, and theory falling under the paradigm. The

paradigm's mode of action is an apparently logical mode, since it uses disjunction or conjunction,

for example. Thus, there are three sorts of possible paradigms when considering the relations

between the two key concepts of nature and humanity: there is the paradigm of inclusion,

whereby humanity is included in nature, as

 the classical writers and authors did (human nature);

 or there is the paradigm of disjunction, which can include only culture or humanity, by

opposing and rejecting that which is natural and vice versa;

 or again, there is the paradigm of distinction, conjunction, and inclusion, which I shall

call complexity, because it associates all three notions that would seem to exclude each

other.

A major paradigm requires an understanding of very many fields, and corresponds to what

Foucault called "épistémè." This is what happens to the paradigm of simplification, which is a

principle of disjunction and/or reduction between cognitive categories. The paradigm of

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 207

simplification orders disjunction in all distinct but possibly linked areas. This is how the

disjunction between order and disorder, between mind and matter, between man and nature,

between subject and object, between the observer and the observed, between the one and the

multiple operates. It also provides order to the first reduction, from the complex to the simple,

from the whole to its parts. The disjunction and reduction lead to the rejection of the non-

quantifiable, which finally leads to discarding the beings and existents. Logically, simplification

gives an absolute value to Aristotelian logic, where contradiction always means "error"; in this

sense, from the paradigmatic point of view, Aristotelian logic controls thought whereas thought

does not control logic. The paradigm of simplification gives us a simple view of the world,

subject to determinism and functioning in this way forever after.

If we could imagine a paradigm of complexity, it would be a paradigm uniting

distinction, which is necessary to grasp objects or phenomena, with conjunction, which is

necessary to establish links and interrelations. It would not reduce the complex to the simple, but

would integrate the simple within the complex. A paradigm of complexity would be a paradigm

where thought would not be controlled by logic, but logic would be controlled by thought. More

specifically, it would be a dialogical principle. The word dialogical itself establishes then

limitations and possibilities of knowledge. Why limitations? Dialogical means it is impossible to

reach a sole principle, or a master word, whatever it is; there will always be something

irreducible to a simple principle, be it chance, uncertainty, contradiction, or organization. But at

the same time, dialogics, while it contains an intrinsic limitation, also includes the possibility of

bringing concepts into play among themselves. These concepts may be complementary,

competitive, and antagonistic in what I call the tetagram of

[insert figure 12]

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 208

This means that a phenomenon cannot be reduced to only one of these phenomena, and,

that to understand it, these four notions must be allowed to interact with the interplay varying

according to the actual phenomena under observation. In other words, the principle of dialogics

is to have complementary interplay between notions, which, in absolute terms, would clash and

reject each other.

Now, I would like to touch briefly on the myth of simplicity, which has prevailed in

science. It was believed that scientific knowledge was a phenomenon, simply because it was

inspired by an ideal of simplification, whereby behind the world of complex, thwarted, arbitrary

illusions, there are some simple laws that science seeks out and reveals. But science could

neither have existed nor progressed without being complex in its processes, production, and

evolution. As Popper has shown, scientific knowledge is possible, and progress is achieved only

because there is this confrontation of conflicting theories and postulates within a medium where

there is a consensus on the rules of the empirico-logical game to determine the truth and the

errors of these theories. In other words, scientific knowledge presupposes a dialogic between a

community component consensus on the rules of the game and the value of knowledge, and a

society component in the sense of "gesellschaft." that is rivalry, competition, and conflict

between scientists. It is because there is this dialogical mix between common ground and rivalry

that science exists. Moreover, scientific concepts include not only the themata (Holton), the

postulates (Popper), and the hard core (Lakatos), but in fact science walks on four independent

legs that all belong to the same animal: rationalism, empiricism, imagination, verification; there

is complementarity as well as antagonism between empirical and rationalist thought just as there

is complementarity and antagonism between imagination and verification. And it is because

there is this permanent conflictuality at the same time as this permanent complementarity
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 209

between rationalism, empiricism, imagination, and verification that there is dynamism in science.

Therefore, science functions and progresses in a dialogical, that is, complex manner, even when

it is inspired by simplicity. Incidentally, this is the expression of a scientific ideology at a given

moment in the history of science, and I would even say it is a very short moment for it begins in

the seventeenth century and ends perhaps at a time when the twentieth century is in its throes of

agony.

Now, let us consider this myth of invisible simplicity hidden behind the complex

appearance. An examination of this idea, cherished by so many scientists, leads to the realization

that it is a metaphysical obsession: the idea that another world exists behind ours, another world

of pure, universal laws, compared to which, the world of phenomena in which we live is

inevitably debased. We have the impression that we are finally experiencing a vision of the

world of the "maya," as the Hindu philosophers call it, the world of fleeting appearances, and

that behind it, there is the world of pure and sovereign order. This is either the world of numbers

(and the belief in the reality of numbers is a subconscious neo-pythagorism), or the world of

"models" (a subconscious neo-platonism). Personally, I believe that one day we will realize that

this myth of another world free of the slag of our world is similar to a very old and great

philosophical dream.

Be that as it may, I shall conclude with the level of reality at which this concept of

complexity is to be found. To imagine it, I think one has to talk of "interest," and my concept of

interest is very different from the meaning given to it by Habermas. There is what can be termed

as the interest or need for useful simplifications, where we require clarity to isolate objects, and

in that context, this is obviously a microphone, that is a table, this is a room, and so on. In that

sense, our universe appears to be extremely simple, decomposable, analyzable. In other words,
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 210

every time we need to remove all ambiguity from the environment, our view of the universe

becomes simple; each time we need to cut it up into segments and manipulate it, our view of the

universe becomes simple. But if your interest is the phenomenal world, the world in which we

live, existentially, politically, socially, and anthropologically, there is no doubt that this world is

one of complexity, where everything is interaction, inter-retroaction, and interrelation, and it is

then that we are forced to see it in a complex way if we do not want to seriously mutilate reality.

And if our interest lies in reviewing fundamental problems of knowledge and understanding,

then we find complexity paradigmatic and logical, where there is no pure principle, no unique

law, no formula unifying the universe, just the conjunction of logically contradictory principles

and a growing obscurity towards the unthinkable, inconceivable, and unsayable, especially when

we tackle the problem of the origin of the cosmos and of the foundation of matter.

To conclude, I would say that reality is neither simple nor complex. It is something else.

It is enormous, outside any standards, unheard of, it is incredible, it presents many faces

depending on our questions. The thought process developed through simplification, that is

disjunction, reduction, selection, quantification, formalization, etc., uses more and more

manipulatory methods to comprehend it. But at the same time, it gives precedence to the logico-

mathematical aspect of the universe, its "order," and it believes that it has discovered the truth -

the mind's way of adapting to objects in the logico-mathematical order of the universe. This view

reassures its followers, because it gives the impression that the world is totally thinkable, that is,

totally digestible by the mind. If, for example, one wants to think of it in the light of complexity,

then, on the one hand, one is very much concerned by the phenomena themselves, and on the

other hand, one is much more prepared to consider the fundamental contradictions in the thought

and mystery of the world. At the same time; however, knowledge is no longer identified with
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 211

manipulation. Complex knowledge is no longer studied mainly for the sake of manipulation, but

to think, meditate, beginning with beings, with things, with the world. And I would even go so

far as to say that the need for contemplation is thus revived. You will remember that "theoria"

means to contemplate. Should we not, in our techno-bureaucratized society, stimulate the aim of

learning to enhance understanding? Complexity is feared because it obliges us to come to terms

with uncertainty and contradiction. Facing contradiction and uncertainty resembles remarkably

the struggle between Jacob and the angel, in Saint-Sulpice Church in Paris, where we cannot tell

whether Jacob and the angel are fighting to the death or are locked in embrace. If you question

reality with simplifying thought, it is extremely simple. If you question it with complexifying

thought, reality will be complex. Apparently, it always obeys thought. This really means that

there is always a deeper meaning that goes unnoticed, in other words, that there is more to reality

than the human mind is aware of.

Notes
1. Copyright 1984 by the United Nations University. Reproduced with the permission of the

United Nations University.

2. Cf (1977). La Méthode 1, La nature de la nature, [Method. 1. The nature of nature],

Paris: Seuil. pp. 105-115.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 212

Chapter 8: Epistemology – Complexity1

“La vie est un peu plus compliquée qu’on ne dit, et même les circonstances. II y a une nécessité
pressante à montrer cette complexité.”
Marcel Proust (Le temps retrouvé)

From the simple to the complex

What is not simple

Complexity is a concept of which the first definition can only be negative: complexity is what is

not simple. A simple object is an object which can be conceived as an indivisible elementary

unit. A simple concept is one whereby such an object can be conceived clearly and distinctly, as

an entity which can be isolated from its surroundings. A simple explanation is one whereby a

composite phenomenon can be reduced to its elementary units and the whole can be conceived as

the sum of the characteristics of the units. In simple causality cause and effect can be isolated

and the effect of the cause can be predicted in a strictly determinist manner. Simplicity precludes

what is complicated, uncertain, ambiguous, contradictory. And the theory that corresponds to

simple phenomena is a simple theory. However, a simple theory may be applied to complicated,

ambiguous and uncertain phenomena. In this case a process of simplification takes place. The

problem of complexity is that of phenomena which cannot be reduced to the simple thought

patterns of the observer. In other words, complexity will first manifest itself, for this observer, in

the form of obscurity, doubts, ambiguity, or even paradox or contradiction. Of course all

knowledge involves a simplifying process in that it abstracts, i.e. eliminates a number of

empirical properties of the phenomenon as non-significant, irrelevant, contingent. However, it

must not oversimplify, that is, exclude as epiphenomenal everything which does not fit into a

simplifying pattern. Here we come to the problem: it is always possible to banish the complex to

the periphery, retaining only what can be simplified, and decide that only what can be simplified
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 213

comes within the purview of science. To do so is, however, becoming less and less easy in all the

sciences—except, strange to say, in the human sciences, which have the most complex subject-

matter of all, but at the same time, and for this very reason, feel at a loss in the face of such

complexity.

Less and less simple

Up to the end of the nineteenth century the pioneering science was physics, which was based on

the simple pattern of general laws, strictly determinist in character, and elementary units which

could be quantified, isolated and identified without ambiguity. However, first with

thermodynamics, then, in the course of the twentieth century, with the development of

microphysics and relativist macrophysics, even physics lost its simplicity. In microphysics it is

the basic phenomena with which it is concerned which become uncertain, ambiguous or even

contradictory: their individual behaviour eludes determinism, their nature is conceivable now as

a wave now as a corpuscle, and today it is even a moot question whether the concept of an

elementary particle has any meaning. In macrophysics the categories of time and space are no

longer clear and distinct but run into one another. We discover that the physical universe is

complex in its infinitesimal structure as in its cosmic vastness. This being the case we do not see

why biological phenomena should be any less complex than physical phenomena. However, it

would be an over-simplification to reduce biological complexity to physical complexity.

Biological phenomena have a complexity all their own. The manifold advances of genetic

biology, ethology, ecology, lead us to discover complexity where formerly we saw either simple

phenomena or the intervention of some 'vital principle', supraphysical or metaphysical, but itself

inexorably simple like all the principles of idealism. Molecular biology, by demonstrating that

biological phenomena are all physico-chemical phenomena, has not brought about a reduction
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 214

from the complex to the simple: quite the contrary, since in order to describe these phenomena it

has had to have recourse to organizational concepts unknown in the strictly physico-chemical

field, such as information, code, message, inhibition, repression, hierarchy, etc. In other words,

the specific complexity of life is of an organizational character. This we shall see in due course.

However, two remarks can be made at the outset: first, the simple is not the physical substratum

to which a biological complexity can be reduced; the simple is just one aspect (that of traditional

physics), a state, a moment, a transition between several complexities. Second, the human

phenomenon is not the sole and exclusive bearer of complexity in a simple natural universe. If it

is the bearer of the greatest complexity which we can conceive as yet, it is rather as the bearer of

a very high degree of complexity, or even 'hypercomplexity', by comparison with a biological

universe itself complex. As the borderline between the biological and the human is not a question

of complexity, everything said here about biological complexity will apply a fortiori to the

human. Our approach to the problem therefore will be in no sense reductionist: on the contrary,

being exploratory in character, far from simplifying it will only make more complex.

Our intention then is to try and elucidate the fundamental characteristics of biological

complexity. This is a subject which has been very little explored as yet but which von Neumann

has opened up magnificently with his 'Theory of self-reproducing automata'.

More and more complicated

Biological complexity appears first as a quantitative phenomenon. A cell is made up of millions

of molecules. A living organism such as the human organism is made up of thousands of

millions of cells. The extraordinary thing is that this quantitative phenomenon is also

qualitatively complex. The architecture of these thousands of millions of constituents does not

follow a simple orderly pattern as does the accretion of crystals, nor is it disorderly and subject to
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 215

simple statistical rules as are the molecules of a gas. The relationships between the constituents

which go to make up a living being are not of juxtaposition or supraposition, but of interaction

and interference. Now the number of possible interactions between these thousands of millions

of constituents goes beyond the bounds of 'astronomical' figures. As Ashby noted in 1964,

everything that is material stops at 10100, but everything that is combinative (combinations,

relations, properties, types, patterns, constraints, etc.) goes a great deal further.

So here we are in the realm of the incommensurable. No doubt this is not yet biological

complexity proper, but we already have the premises of that complexity in the increasingly

complicated pattern of interrelations, interactions and interferences and the obfuscation of

causative processes resulting from and manifest in reciprocal causality and feedback effects. Is

this biological complexity proper? No, not yet, for cybernetics is already at a level of complex

causality, with feedback effects and the machine programmed to correct the effects produced by

external agents. It might then be thought that biological complexity resides in the greater number

and complexity of interrelations as compared with those of machines, that is, that the

phenomenon of life is complex owing to the higher degree of complication and confusion. In this

case complexity would be no more than an extreme complication, simply placing us in the

situation of kittens faced with a tangled skein of wool, which could be untangled and pulled out

in a single strand with adequate implements, time and patience. The limitations on our

knowledge would be quantitative in nature, and would not be due to the quality of the living

thing, which would remain a mere deterministic machine. However, it would be too simple to

reduce complexity to complication.

Biological complexity or self-organization

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 216

Complexity and the organization of diversity

What is here asserted applies not only to living phenomena, but to all organized phenomena,

even if they are not biological. In other words, the sphere of complexity is that of organized

diversity, of the organization of diversity.

The sphere of complexity does not a priori include either a simple, irreducible unit or an

unorganized population of units (such as molecules of a gas) or a disorganized diversity (such as

a cart of rubbish).

If we remain within the 'medium range' of physical phenomena2 (that is, if we exclude

the field of microphysics and that of macrophysics, which is moreover a simplification in

method), complexity begins as soon as there is some system, that is, interrelations between

various elements in a unit which becomes a complex unit (one and manifold).

Systemic complexity is manifest in particular in the fact that the whole possesses

qualities and properties which are not to be found in the parts in isolation and, conversely, that

the parts possess qualities and properties which disappear as a result of the organizational

constraints of the system. Systemic complexity increases on the one hand with the increase in the

number and diversity of the component parts, on the other with the increased flexibility and

complication of the interrelations (interactions, feedback effects, interferences, etc.) and the

decrease in their determinism (at least from the standpoint of an observer).

Another order of complexity is reached when the system is 'open', that is, when its

existence and the maintenance of its diversity are inseparable from interrelations with the

environment, interrelations whereby the system draws on the outside world for material/energy

and, at a higher level of complexity, elicits information. Here we have a truly complex and
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 217

ambiguous relation between the open system and the environment, vis-à-vis which it is at the

same time autonomous and dependent.

Yet another order of complexity is reached with cybernetic systems, whose organization

cannot be understood without recourse to the concepts of data, programme, control, etc.

A living system, for its part, possesses and combines to an exceptional degree systemic

complexity, the complexity of the 'open' system and cybernetic complexity. It might be supposed

that, having said this, we have adequately described the complexity of living things, and that it

would suffice to bring in systems theory and cybernetics. Our aim here, on the contrary, is to

demonstrate that the complexity peculiar to living things, while it comprehends these orders of

complexity, is of another order, another quality, and answers to a different organizing principle.

The mysterious automated factory

The cell, which is the basic unit of living things, has of course often been compared to an

extremely sophisticated automatically controlled factory. A cell does indeed carry out a

multiplicity of processing operations in accordance with what seems to be a detailed programme

(the instructions of the 'genetic code'). However, this comparison, or assimilation, leaves out of

account the peculiar characteristics of a factory on the one hand and of living matter on the other,

and also, in either case, their living complexity. For a factory makes sense only within the

framework of the society which built it and within which it operates, which takes us back to the

technology, economic structure, division of labour and social stratification of that society.

Furthermore, however highly automated a factory may be, it is controlled by human beings, who

are themselves actors on the social stage. In other words, a factory cannot be understood unless

the social complexity of industrial society is brought into the picture and this is the product of a
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 218

very long evolution at the origin of which is to be found . . . the original living cell. In other

words, the cybernetic complexity of a factory is only one aspect, and not the most complex, of

the living social complexity which produced it and, through environmental influences,

determines how it should operate. On the other hand, a cell, in the case of unicellular beings,

while it obviously depends on the ecosystem outside to which it belongs and on which it draws

for its complexity, bases that complexity on its own generating system, that is its self-

organization. Although it is as sophisticated as any automated factory and even more so, it

operates without directors, engineers, cleaners that is without living beings more complex than

itself to produce and control it. It is obviously not produced by a pre-existing external economic

and social system. It is as though the molecules were at the same time programmers, workmen,

machines, producers and consumers. The 'programme' evidently does not proceed from some

more complex external reality; it is within the cell and it comes from another cell, by self-

reproduction and so on. The comparison with an automated factory, therefore, like any

cybernetic comparison, ignores the very kernel of biological complexity, which is

self-organization.

The strictly cybernetic view leaves out of account the external complexity of the artificial

automaton (the automated factory) and the internal complexity of the natural automaton (the

living being), which is self-organizing. On the contrary, the problem is to grasp the internal

complexity peculiar to the natural automaton, at the same time taking into account the

complexity of the relationship-which this internal complexity (i.e. once again, capacity for self-

organization) alone makes possible—between the living being and what is outside it (the

ecosystem).3

The natural automaton-generativity and disorder

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 219

Here von Neumann introduces us to what constitutes the fundamental difference between even

the most highly perfected artificial automaton (computer, automated factory) and the most

rudimentary natural automaton, the unicellular being, and thereby takes us to the heart of

biological complexity. This difference is apparent in three interdependent aspects.

First, an artificial machine is made up of extremely reliable components, that is of parts

which are calibrated, checked and perfectly adjusted to each other and consist of the toughest

materials and those the least likely to become deformed having regard to the work to be effected.

However, the reliability of the machine as a whole is extremely low; in other words it stops and

goes out of order as soon as any single one of its parts is damaged. The more numerous and

interdependent are its parts, the less reliable it is. Living beings, on the other hand, are made up

of very unreliable parts: the molecules of a cell, the cells of an organism, are continually

deteriorating and their life span is very short (for instance, 99 per cent of the molecules in a

human being are destroyed in the course of a year). However, the whole is much more reliable

than its component parts and its reliability is no whit diminished as the number of those parts and

the interrelations between them increase. As a whole it is much more reliable than any natural

machine. The whole can function despite the definitive deterioration of certain parts, despite

accidents affecting different parts. Equifinality is nothing other than this aptitude of living beings

which enables them to achieve their ends (carry out their 'programmes') by roundabout ways in

spite of deficiencies, accidents or obstacles, whereas a machine, once it is deprived of one of its

parts or one of its supplies, deteriorates, stops or yields faulty products.

Hence the question, asked by von Neumann: how can an extremely reliable automaton be

made up of extremely unreliable component parts?4 The question can be taken a step further: is
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 220

the low reliability of the component parts not so much detrimental as essential to the high

reliability of living beings?

Secondly, the problem of reliability can be stated in more general terms of order and

disorder. The wear and tear, distortion and deterioration affecting the different parts of a machine

are prejudicial to order in that machine and they may be regarded as elements or factors in

disorder. If the machine is a cybernetic machine which has a programme or processes data, this

disorder may be regarded as 'noise'. Any chance disturbance which occurs in the communication

of data, thereby distorting the message, which becomes faulty, is called 'noise'. 'Noise' is

therefore disorder, which by disorganizing the message becomes a source of error. Disorder,

'noise' and error are in this context reflected concepts. Now not only is an artificial machine very

quickly affected by disorder, 'noise' and error (owing to its low reliability), but it cannot tolerate

them. The most that it can do is to diagnose the error and stop immediately so as to arrest the

otherwise inevitable spread of the disorder (positive feedback). The functioning of a living

system, on the contrary, is always consistent with some disorder, 'noise' and error within certain

limits. In this connexion the deterioration of the molecules and cells of organisms, which, as we

have seen, is constant, affords a continuous source of disorder. Furthermore, the cells of an

organism are autonomous to some extent: whereas in a machine the component parts have to be

fitted together in an extremely precise, hard-and-fast fashion, the manner in which cells and

organs fit together is extremely casual and involves therefore a certain amount of uncertainty and

chance. In an organism the presence of germs or toxic elements, as also the uncontrolled

proliferation of cells, are, within limits of course, normal phenomena. For example, in so far as

cancer is concerned, 'malignant cells constantly come into existence and are eliminated by the

immunological defences as soon as they appear' (Lwoff, 1972). Moreover, on considering both
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 221

natural ecosystems and higher societies (those of ants as well as those of mammals and of course

human beings), one notes not only a very large number of random movements in the behaviour

of individuals, but incessant conflicts between individuals and group or class antagonisms. One

realizes that in the realm of living things relations between parts or subsystems, between

individuals or groups are not characterized by a perfect fit or strict complementarity: rivalry,

competition, antagonism and conflict occur and these are the sources of disturbances and

disorder. Such relations are impossible as yet in an artificial machine.

Now this is indeed a sign of complexity because the more highly a living system is

evolved, the more complex it is, the more it will comprise of disorder, 'noise' and error. The most

complex systems we know, the human brain and human society, are those which function with

the largest proportion of uncertainties, disorder and 'noise'. Once again complexity is apparent as

ambiguity and paradox, in this case in the relation between order and disorder. Again one cannot

help taking the paradox still further and asking oneself whether living beings do not function not

only despite disorder but also with disorder. The complexity of living things is then seen as that

of an organizing principle which bases itself specifically on disorder (whether due to

deterioration, conflict or antagonism), in order to develop its qualities surpassing those of any

machine.

Thirdly, the problem can now be stated in radical terms. Every organized physical system

is unremittingly subject to the working of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, namely

increasing entropy within the system, manifest in the increase in disorder at the expense of order,

of homogeneity at the expense of heterogeneity (the diversity of the component parts), in short,

of disorganization at the expense of organization. In this sense even the most highly perfected

artificial machine is always degenerative, and since it is as a whole very unreliable it degenerates
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 222

rapidly. It starts to deteriorate as soon as it has been constructed, whether or not it is in operation.

One cannot arrest this deterioration except from the outside, by repairing or changing the worn

parts. In other words, the regenerating force is outside the machine.

Moreover, it is not only the machine which is subject to deterioration, but also the

information (the programme) which controls and runs it: in accordance with Shannon's theorem,

that the quantity of information received by a receiver cannot more than equal the quantity of

information transmitted by a transmitter, information itself is degenerative, subject to the various

types of 'noise' which lead to errors and finally distort the message.

A living machine, on the contrary, is not degenerative—at least on a temporary basis. The

reason is immediately apparent. It is because it is capable of renewing its molecular and cellular

components when they deteriorate. Certain species can even regenerate whole organs. Of course

a living individual degenerates in the end: it ages and dies; entropy prevails under the statistical

effect of the accumulation of 'errors' occurring in the transmission of the genetic message'5

(validating in this respect Shannon's theorem on the deterioration of information). However, this

is offset by the generative capacity of living beings, obviously unknown as yet in artificial

automatons. A natural automaton is a self-reproducing automaton that is it is capable of

generating another natural automaton. It is capable of reproducing and multiplying the living

complex organization. And this generativity is also apparent in regard to the ontogenesis of

individuals: starting from an egg, they accomplish a generative cycle which leads them to

maturity. All this, while not in contradiction with the second law, is not foreseen by it. As has

often been said, living self-organization plays much the same part as Maxwell's demon, using its

informative power to sort and select the moving molecules in such a way as to restore

heterogeneity while paying its toll to entropy (Brillouin).

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 223

One must go still further and take generativity in the widest sense, as including the

generation of information itself. Biological evolution may be regarded as the ramification of

self-organization from what was for the plant and animal kingdoms a single unicellular stem, that

is to say, the development of many different forms of complexity of their generative system.

These forms are developed by means of favourable genetic mutations, which enrich the

hereditary stock by adding to its complexity. So there is an essential link between generativity

and biological complexity: biological complexity results in generativity and generativity results

in complexity. Von Neumann, once again, had realized that the qualitatively new principle which

was evidenced by the natural automaton as compared with the artificial automaton or with any

strict physico-chemical system was to be found in generativity.

'Life from death, death from life'

Here we come to the heart of the paradox. The reliability, the non-degenerativity and the

generativity of living systems depend in a way on the unreliability and degenerativity of their

component parts. The success of life depends on its very mortality. Disorder, 'noise' and error are

lethal to living things in different respects, at different levels and after different passages of time,

but they are also an integral part of their non-degenerative self-organization as well as

stimulating the manifold development of their generative system.

The constant deterioration of the molecular and cellular components is the weakness

which gives living beings the advantage over machines. It is the source of the constant renewal

of life. It does not only mean that the order of living things feeds on disorder. It also means that

the organization of living things is essentially a system of permanent reorganization (Atlan).

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 224

The crux of biological complexity is the indissoluble bond between continuous decay and

auto-poiesis, between life and mortality. Whereas the simple 'solution' of machines is to delay

the fatal course of entropy by the high reliability of their component parts, the complex 'solution'

of living things is to accentuate and amplify disorder in order to find therein the means of

renewing the order they evince. Generativity functions with disorder, tolerating it, using it and

combating it in a relationship which is antagonistic, competitive and complementary at the same

time. Permanent reorganization and auto-poiesis constitute categories applicable to the whole

biological order and, a fortiori, to the human sociological order. A cell is in a permanent state of

self-production through the death of its molecules. An organism is in a permanent state of self-

production through the death of its cells (which . . . etc.). A society is in a permanent state of

self-production through the death of its individual members (which . . . etc.). It continually

reorganizes itself through disorders, antagonisms and conflicts, which undermine its existence

and at the same time maintain its vitality.

In all cases, therefore, the process of disorganization/degeneration plays a part in the

process of reorganization/regeneration. Disorganization becomes one of the fundamental

characteristics of the functioning of the system, that is of its organization. The factors of

disorganization play a part in organization in much the same way as the disorganizing tactics of

the other side in a football match are an indispensable element in the tactics of a team, which

becomes capable of the most highly refined combinatory constructions, working within the

framework of binding rules (as are the instructions of the genetic code) in such a way as to

evolve a flexible strategy as suggested by the vicissitudes of the match. This indeed is the basis

of von Foerster's 'order from noise' principle (von Foerster, 1960), which will be generalized to

apply to all creation, all development, all evolution.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 225

This principle differs from the mechanical 'order from order' principle, the purely

invariant principle of traditional physics, and also from the 'order from disorder' principle of

statistics, according to which when one is dealing with large numbers or populations, disorderly

or random movements of units obey laws of order, following average or general trends, though

without any generativity. The von Foerster principle is complementary/antagonistic of the

'disorder from order' principle, the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It implies a principle of

selection/organization which in the case of living things has an informational character capable

of developing a process which absorbs the lowest forms of order and thereby converts a

corresponding degree of disorder into a system of a higher order (Gunther, p. 341). What we

have here, according to Gunther, is a synthesis of the ideas 'order from order' and 'order from

disorder', i.e. 'order from (order+disorder)' (ibid.). It seems to me that he forgets that for this

synthesis to come about yet another principle has to be brought in, that of 'disorder from order'.

The 'order from noise' principle can be understood as having two different but

complementary meanings. The first is that of non-degenerativity, where, as we have seen, the

continuing processes of self-reorganization/auto-poiesis require 'noise' in order to maintain the

order of living things. The second is that of generativity in the creative sense of the word, as it is

evidenced in all evolution, whether biological or, in the case of man, sociological. Take for

instance biological evolution, which operates through mutations. What is a mutation? No matter

what prodigious obscurities surround it, it is plain that we have here a phenomenon involving

disorganization of the hereditary message as a result of 'noise' interfering with the reproduction

of the matrix message and giving rise to 'errors' in regard to it. However, it is through this 'noise'

and these 'errors' that the message is reorganized into another message which may, where things

work out well, be richer and more complex than the former message. So it is the encounter
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 226

between 'noise' and a principle of self-organization which leads to the constitution of a more

complex higher order.

Thus it is clear that the idea of self-reorganization concerns not only the continuing

phenomena of non-degenerative self-conservation and generative self-reproduction but also the

phenomena of transformation, development and complexification of generativity.

We can now understand the expression negentropy as applied rightly to living things.

Negentropy in no way eliminates entropy. On the contrary, as with any energy consumption

phenomenon or heat combustion phenomenon, the one leads to the other and enhances it. Of

course living things combat entropy by supplying themselves with energy and information from

outside, from the environment, and by casting out into the environment as waste the deteriorated

residual materials which they cannot assimilate. However, at the same time life is reorganized, as

a result of entropy exercising its lethal, disorganizing effect within. Without entropy there can be

no negentropy. Thus we do not have here a simple Manichaean opposition between two

antagonistic principles, as is too often supposed. On the contrary, we have a complex relation,

complementary, competitive and antagonistic at the same time. This essential quality of

biological complexity was adumbrated in exemplary fashion by Heraclitus: 'Life from death and

death from life.' Hegel too came very near the concept of negentropy with his 'magic force

(Zauberkraft) causing the Negative to return to Being'.

A principle of development

As we have just seen, self-organization, that is, biological complexity, involves a morphogenetic

aptitude, that is, an aptitude for creating new forms and structures, which themselves, when they

lead to an increase in complexity, constitute developments of self-organization.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 227

Not only do these developments make the internal organization of living systems more

complex (constitution of multicellular organisms themselves involving more and more complex

processes of functioning with the appearance of homoiothermic systems, nervous systems, etc.),

but they also affect relations with the environment (the ecosystem), particularly in regard to

behaviour.

The more complex behaviour becomes, the more flexibility there is in regard to

adaptation to the environment. Behaviour becomes amenable to modification in response to

external changes—in particular, unforeseen contingencies, disturbances and events—and also

becomes capable of modifying the immediate environment, arranging it and adapting it to the

living system.

Flexibility in regard to the adaptation of behaviour is evinced in the development of

heuristic, inventive and variable strategies to replace rigidly programmed behaviour.

The development of strategies of course implies the internal development of self-

organizational systems capable of organizing behaviour. These systems come to deal in a more

and more complex way with unforeseen contingencies, disorder and 'noise' coming from the

outside, when they are acting on or communicating with the outside world. In other words, self-

organization, as it becomes more complex, becomes increasingly capable of organizing the

environment and introducing into natural behaviour the very complexity of its internal

organization. Behaviour then becomes capable of dealing in autonomous fashion not only with

the deterministic effects of the environment, but also with its unforeseen contingencies, disorder

and chance occurrences. The sphere of behaviour tends to become almost as complex as that of

internal organization, sometimes more so.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 228

In this way morphogenetic possibilities which were first strictly confined to genetic

mutation are carried over to behaviour, action and artefacts and become creativity. The

development of heuristic abilities with a capacity of envisaging several possible strategies,

namely giving rise to the possibility of choice, heralds the birth of freedoms.

Freedom and creativity are ideas which until now seemed to come down as a gift from

the metaphysical firmament to guide the mechanical behaviour of the organism. However, as we

have seen, creativity has roots which go back a very long way, seeing that the origin of life, and

every favourable genetic mutation, are creative acts in the morphogenetic sense of the term.

Freedom, too, has roots that go deep: originally, no doubt, it arises out of what we call

microphysical indeterminacy, and its basis is in all probability the complex whole in which a

self-organizing being combines this microphysical uncertainty, the tendency towards entropy and

disorder and the deterministic order applicable to the 'medium range' of physical phenomena.

Later on we shall see that a being of this kind is possessed of a flexible logical principle enabling

it to escape the binary all-or-nothing principle. The important thing to note here is that freedom

is a development of the ability of a self-organizing being to use uncertainty and chance

occurrences in a way which is itself aleatory and uncertain but conduces to autonomy. Freedom

therefore appears as a consequence of complexification and not its ground. It results from the

development of highly combinatory systems capable of evolving strategies, systems which

simultaneously generate a wealth of internal potentialities and also possibilities for choice in

action. Consequently freedom not only raises the possibilities implicit in the 'order from noise'

principle to a higher level but extends them to behaviour.

All these properties—adaptability, creativity, freedom—tend to foster each other's

development, and take on another aspect with the advent of Homo sapiens and the emergence of
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 229

human societies. From then on creativity can be brought to bear on artefacts, for use or

decoration, while freedoms can be institutionalized and begin to constitute an element in the self-

organization of human societies. Thus all these properties of the human spirit can be not of

course reduced but traced back originally to the generative characteristics of biological self-

organization. No claim is made here to 'explain' human creativity and freedom: our purpose is to

clarify the necessary conditions for their appearance. One thing has already been established:

inventiveness, creativity and freedom are no longer excluded from the province of science; they

are no longer ascribed to a deus ex machina, be it chance or what you will. Self-organization and

complexity have no doubt always been concerned, always will be concerned, with the

contingent. The latter enters into all creation, but the mysterious kernel of life, of creation, of

freedom, is to be found in the encounter between the organizational principle and the aleatory

event, disorder, 'noise'.

And always development will have an aleatory character. It is for this reason that

advances in complexity are marginal phenomena, statistically in the minority, and in this sense

'improbable'. Failures greatly outnumber successes and progress is always uncertain.

Complexity of complexity

The notion of complexity does not lend itself readily to conceptualization. On the one hand,

because it is barely emergent; on the other hand, because it cannot but be complex. However,

biological complexity can already be recognized as a basic concept of an organizational order

characterized by self-organization. It relates to a form of organization combining, in a peculiar

manner, the uncertainty of principles of microphysics and the deterministic principles of the

'medium range' of physical phenomena and its negentropy properties are inseparable from the

production of entropy. The theory of biological complexity is therefore inseparable from a theory
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 230

of the physical universe, but it constitutes an original development which calls for an original

theory. We are only at the preliminary stage. (In the present paper no attempt has been made to

consider the meaning of the recurrent prefix 'self' in self-organization from the standpoint of

complexity. This will be considered in another paper, which is now being prepared.)

Levels of complexity
The many roads leading to complexity

From bacteria to multicellular organisms, from worms to mammals, from lemuroidea to Homo

sapiens, there is complexification and it can be assumed that any increase in self-organizing

ability is an increase in complexity. However, it would be crude, and in any case not complex, to

try to classify living beings according to a scale of complexity, and, worse still, to contemplate

measuring degrees of complexity, even approximately. There are two main reasons for this. One

is that there are many roads to complexity. The other is that living systems combine in varying

ways, zones of high complexity and zones of low complexity: some complexity traits have

developed in societies of ants, bees and termites and not in human societies, and of course there

are others which are evident only in human societies.

In the first place then it is essential to bear in mind the diverse nature of complexity.

There are several roads to complexity, both for organisms and for societies. For instance,

there is the 'centric' road, in which the organism develops a central system of control such as the

central nervous system in vertebrates and especially mammals (development of the brain) or in

which the society develops a central controlling authority (chief, ruling class, State). There is

also the 'acentric' road, in which the self-organization of the organism is effected through the

connexions of a polycentric ganglionic circuit or in which the self-organization of the society, as

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 231

with ants (Chauvin), is effected without any social controlling authority (the queen's function is

merely reproductive and she has no authority), through intercommunication between individuals

with an extremely lapidary genetic 'programme'.6

In so far as the development of the complexity of multicellular organisms is concerned, it

seems to be recognized that this must have been effected through increasing differentiation and

specialization of the cells, then of the organs, and through the development of a hierarchical

organization. However, this twofold assertion must be strongly qualified. In point of fact the

development of specialization goes hand in hand with the development of polyvalence, and a

plurality of functions and aptitudes in organs such as the liver, the mouth (which is used in

eating, drinking, breathing, speaking, kissing) and especially the brain itself, of which the cells

are not very much differentiated and vast areas, in the cerebral cortex of man, are not specialized.

There is even reason to think, as we shall see, that specialization is more and more corrected and

limited by polyvalence once a very high degree of complexity is reached.

As for the hierarchical aspect, two different types of phenomena are too often confused

under the term 'hierarchy'. The first is that of a structure of systemic levels superimposed on one

another in which the general properties that emerge at one level become the basic elements of the

next level and so on. In this sense of the term hierarchy is the most conducive to new qualities

and properties emerging. The second type of phenomenon, which corresponds to the ordinary

sense of the term, amounts to a rigid stratification in which each level exercises a strict control

over the level beneath it, whose potentialities for emergence it inhibits or represses, with a

supreme centralizing authority at the top. In the extreme case these two types of organization,

both referred to as hierarchical, and both of which have played their part in the variable and

uncertain process of complexification, are opposed to one another; the former enables new
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 232

qualities to burgeon at each level and is compatible with flexible control no less than with

acentric or polycentric self-organization, while the latter, once certain limits have been passed,

tends to restrict complexity through the rigid nature of its constraints whereas, from a certain

level of complexity on, further progress demands that these constraints should be loosened.

It may be assumed that the complexification of organisms and societies of mammals up

to the primates took place as a result of many complex and variable combinations of antagonistic

tendencies: the tendency to develop a centralizing system, to develop hierarchy in the repressive

sense of the term, to develop differentiation and specialization; and the contrary tendency,

resulting in the development of polycentrism and a low level of specialization-specifically in the

most complex organ, the brain-and also in proliferation of 'noise', that is, random connexions

between neurons.

Unequal complexity within one and the same system

As indicated above, complexity is not uniformly distributed in organisms. In the first place it

varies according to the occasion: in moments of strictly mechanical action less complexity is

involved than in moments of transformation, decision, creation. It also varies from one

component to another: those components or parts of the organism which are responsible for

control and decision-making are obviously more complex than the others.

More generally, living systems are characterized by a varying combination of

components and states, some more complex but also more fragile, others less complex and more

resistant in a sense, but also less flexible and therefore uninventive. They have a twofold

potentiality, for an increase in complexity and for a decrease in complexity, the increase and the

decrease occurring sometimes in alternation, sometimes simultaneously (in critical situations). At

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 233

such times systems react either by a tendency to regress to the least complex states and solutions

or by increased attention to heuristic strategies and the invention of new solutions, or by all this

at once.

There is certainly a limit to the increase in complexity within a system. Once that limit

has been reached there is too much 'disorder' and 'noise' and the system can no longer be

integrated. A system cannot dispense with constraints, which are due as much to the physico-

chemical properties of its components as to the form of organization itself. But what is the limit

of complexity? Putting the question the other way round, what are the as yet untapped

possibilities of complexity? This is the problem which man poses today on this planet.

The problem of hypercomplexity

The advent of Homo sapiens raises the problem of hypercomplexity, that is of a self-organizing

system in which there is a progressive development of organizational and creative abilities

coupled with a gradual reduction of constraints, hierarchies and centralization.

The problem arises inasmuch as the human brain has hypercomplex characteristics, as we

have endeavoured to suggest elsewhere (Morin, 1973). Of course it is hard to draw a clear

boundary between complexity and hypercomplexity, more especially as the brain is

consubstantial with the organism, which is less complex than itself, moreover, the brain need not

exemplify only hypercomplex states but also, simultaneously, states which are merely

complex. Although it is thus impossible to detach or isolate a hypercomplex system, one can at

least attempt to obtain a picture of hypercomplexity by taking as a basis certain features of the

organization and functioning of the human brain. In this respect hypercomplexity is

characterized by a low level of differentiation between units (neurons) and the existence of
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 234

regions not having specific functions; by a weak hierarchical relationship between cerebral

subsystems; by polycentrism (while the brain as a whole is a centre for decision-making, there is

no point in the brain which decides); by manifold interrelations and interferences between the

individual components and the subsystems; by manifold strong inter-reactions with the

environment; and by the considerable importance of random connexions, that is, of 'disorder'

and 'noise'. Now it is just such a system which enables heuristic strategies to prevail over a rigid

programme and ushers in creative ability and all the wealth of imagination. All these features are

already emerging in complexity, but they become preponderant in a system which by

diminishing its constraints develops a structure that is qualitatively irreducible to those that went

before.

As against the superiority of hypercomplexity one must put the danger of being

overwhelmed by 'noise', which then becomes the source of failures, errors and unbridled fantasy.

All these problems I have attempted to consider in Le Paradigme Perdu: la Nature Humaine, so

I am leaving them aside here. Our present concern is rather with the problem with which

contemporary human society is faced. The history of human societies can be viewed as

constituting at once a hesitation, an oscillation, a division and a conflict between solutions

involving a low level of complexity and solutions involving hypercomplexity. This tension,

complementary, competitive and antagonistic at the same time, might be represented as follows:

HISTORICAL SOCIETIES

[Insert figure 13]

It is not a foregone conclusion that human society cannot reach a new qualitative stage in the

direction of hypercomplexity. This would usher in a new era for mankind. Such a hope, although

unlikely to be realized today, cannot be regarded as a Utopian dream.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 235

The logic of complexity. Logical complexity

The challenge to knowledge: uncertainty and ambiguity

As seen by an observer complexity always takes the form of uncertainty. One is no longer

confronted with a specific object, governed by simple laws, about which one can make accurate

predictions. This uncertainty in regard to measurement, calculation and prediction is due, as we

have seen, to: the incommensurability and interlocking nature of the individual components and

the interactions between them; the irregularly aleatory and irregularly determined character of

the self-organizing system from the observer's standpoint; the fact that a capacity for self-

organization is capable of evolving, that is of showing innovatory characteristics, to a greater

extent the more complex it is. Now what is new first appears as deviant or erroneous before

manifesting itself as a tendency, schismogenesis or morphogenesis. So, according as the

complexity of a system increases, our ability to make precise and yet pertinent propositions

concerning its behaviour decreases down to a threshold beyond which precision and pertinence

become almost incompatible characteristics (Zadeh, 1973).

These difficulties can no doubt be overcome to some extent, that is, we can apply

ourselves to the study of constants, which takes us back to simple knowledge; we can apply

ourselves to statistical calculations based on large numbers, which give us a poor knowledge, a

defective one too as soon as there is any change in the system; we can use the ad hoc method of

the black box, which brackets everything that happens within the system, dealing only with what

can be grasped in the least uncertain manner, the inputs and the outputs. However, even then

there is some uncertainty and unpredictability. As Norbert Wiener said, a complex action is one
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 236

in which the combination of inputs required to obtain an output on the world may itself entail a

large number of other combinations (Wiener, 1972, p. 58).

All these roundabout means, which are useful but inadequate, tend to conceal the

essential, that is self-organization, biological complexity, in other words the reality of living

beings.

Now, if we wish to enter this realm we find ourselves faced not only with uncertainties in

regard to quantity, problems of calculation, but also conceptual, theoretical and logical

uncertainties.

Everything that constitutes the wealth and complexity of self-organization presents itself

to our understanding in the form of uncertain, imprecise and ambiguous concepts

(complementarity/competition/antagonism), and even contradictory ones. This is the case for

instance with the correlatives order/disorder, entropy/negentropy, generativity/degenerativity. It

is also the case with the most elementary notion of all, namely life. As I have shown elsewhere

(Morin, 1973), we cannot regard a living system as an object detached from the environment,

and the relations between an open system and the ecosystem are ambiguous—and become more

so with the development of complexity because an increase in autonomy results in increased

dependence on the ecosystem. And after all, what is life? Is it metabolizing ('enjoying'), that is

self-organizational exchange with the environment? Is it reproducing oneself, that is perpetuating

a constant throughout time? Of course, it is both, jointly and severally. Life manifests itself as a

dialogical system, generative (DNA, an almost constant hereditary stock) and phenomenal

(proteins which are unstable and changing, but ensure the adaptive relationship with the outside

world). Now this is in fact an ambiguous system whose nature and purpose it is not possible to
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 237

axiomatize. The problem, which arises even with bacteria, confronts us all the more forcefully,

and in a much more ambiguous fashion, in man.

The human system is made up of a relationship between three correlative terms:

individual, society and species. The distinction between these three terms is vague, for one of

them is always included in the other and they cannot really be isolated. Moreover it would be

impossible to determine which of the three was the 'centre', the 'truth', the 'ultimate end'. Is the

individual in the 'service' of the species? Or of society? Is society in the 'service' of the

individual? Or of the species? Is the species in the 'service' of the individual? Or of society? Only

a philosophical choice enables us to give pre-eminence to one of these terms. In point of fact we

see that they are at the same time complementary, competitive, antagonistic. We also see that

while they are imbricated one in the other they are not actually integrated, one in the other, that

there is the gulf of death between the individual and the species, the gulf of individual egoism

between the individual and society. Yet we feel that these gulfs, these 'contradictions' and the

ensuing disorder are all a part of human complexity.

The observer can of course reduce uncertainty and ambiguity once he devotes himself to

the detailed study of a small sector, limited in space and time, that is, once he forgets the system

as a whole, which then becomes a vague environment. However, what can be readily elucidated

and freed of ambiguity becomes of quite secondary interest because the essential has been

eliminated, that is, self-organizational complexity.

Biological complexity therefore is a real challenge to knowledge. Indeed a whole type of

scientific knowledge which had proved fruitful in regard to the simple—or, in regard to the

complex, had been able to indulge in heuristic simplification—is now rendered inadequate (it is

for this reason that we continue to run away from complexity and prefer to exorcise it). However,
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 238

as Niels Bohr saw in connexion with microphysical complexity, the apparent regression of

knowledge made possible a further decisive advance, the elaboration of new techniques and

methods and the abandonment of a whole outworn cast of thought. Similarly today, the

consequences of biological complexity for knowledge are twofold: first, it calls for recognition

of the fact that a type of knowledge which had been believed to be boundless is limited;

secondly, it spurs us on to a more complex knowledge.

On the one hand, as has been said earlier, biological complexity stimulates us to work out

a theory of self-organization, of complexity greater than that of cybernetics and systems theory.

On the other hand, it obliges us to submit our logic to a sort of fractionation process, whereby it

can be reassayed and enriched.

The logic of living things: a generative logic

Complexity, according to von Neumann, raises a question of principle of a logical character. But

this principle, is it one that would merely bid us use our own logic in a complex fashion,

operating on its frontiers where imprecision and ambiguity appear? Or are we called on to lay

down the principle not of logical complexity, but of a logic of complexity, that is, resort to a new

logic? And is it possible to imagine 'another' logic?

At all events it seems that our logic enables us to apprehend the principles of complexity,

at least in a crude, uncertain and ambiguous manner, but it also seems that this crude, uncertain

and ambiguous manner is the half-light which reveals the shadowy zone between our

Aristotelian logic, based on the principle of identity and the excluded middle, leading us to the

Cartesian principle of clear and distinct ideas, and the obscure nucleus of self-organizational

logic where everything seems to us to be mixed up in what is inexpressible and contradictory.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 239

Then again, there is more than a zone of obscurity, a vacuum, between the processes of the two

logics. Our logic is based on syllogism, deduction, induction; it is tautological, or at least

homoeostatic, that is, it always rests on the confirmation (deduction) or generalization

(induction) of its premises. Organizational logic, for its part, advances by trial and error, by

leaps, which lead to new developments, and even new organizational structures.

The logic which controls our propositions might be said to be highly suitable for

machines, highly suitable for the 'medium range' of physical phenomena, between microphysics

and macrophysics, suitable for many properties of living things, but unsuitable for what is

essential in self-organization and complexity.

The logic of complexity is ill at ease in the rigid frameworks and principles of our logic.

It is characterized, as Elsasser puts it, by 'the absence of pervasive rigid categories' (categories

distributed in uniform fashion throughout the system). In its most essential moments it escapes

the binary logic of all or nothing. It was von Neumann too who saw that the logic of self-

reproducing automata must lead to much less rigid theories than the all or nothing of past and

present formal logic (von Neumann, 1951). Now it is precisely where the logic of living things

escapes all-or-nothing or yes/no logic that we come upon uncertainty and ambiguity. Here the

verifactory/computational force of our logic becomes a weakness. As Nietzsche said: 'the fact

that we are unable to state and deny the same thing simultaneously in no way expresses a

necessity but merely an inability'. And Simondon is making the same point when he writes: 'The

principle of the excluded middle and the principle of identity distinguish an impoverished being,

split between the environment and the individual' (Simondon, 1964, p. 17).

This being the case, we are faced with the problem, or rather the inevitability, of a logic

which does not of course negate our logic within the sphere in which it is operational, but which
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 240

sublates it, in the Hegelian sense, that is retains it while integrating it in a richer logic. It was

Hegel, moreover, who in these terms formulated the opposition between understanding

(Verstand), which corresponds to traditional logic, and reason (Vernunft), which operates on the

wider register of what he called dialectic. This problem has been brought out into the open

again—by Elsasser, after he had corrected his 'vitalism', by von Neumann (logic of probability)

and by Gottard Gunther (pluralist logic). In my view this logic must be at once probabilistic,

flexible, dialogical, dialectical, pluralist and generative.

A logic of probability. As von Neumann put it, if the automaton is not to be at the mercy of a

failure, the axioms cannot be formulated in a rigorous manner. Not: if A and B occur, then D

must follow. But: if A and B occur, C must follow with a certain specified probability, D with

another specified probability and so on (von Neumann, 1966, p. 58). This logic of probability

would make it possible to integrate equifinality phenomena (where a system may take a number

of different routes to arrive at the same result) and phenomena where the same causes can

produce different effects in similar systems. At the same time it would enable us to deal with

'noise' and error. In von Neumann's words, in machines everything is based on the perfection of

determinist operations and there is no theoretical processing of error (which is diagnosed and

eliminated), whereas the logic of natural automata is a logic of probability which manipulates the

defect of a component part as an essential integrating part of the automaton's operations; in all

these respects the logic of probability governing natural automata is a highly combinatory logic,

which therefore attains to at least a certain level of the combinatory complexity of living things.

A flexible logic. The logic of probability suggested by von Neumann is at the same time a

flexible logic. In the passages just quoted he calls for a 'non-rigid' concep-tion, 'non-rigorous'
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 241

axioms, and suggests that we beware of the 'perfection' of determinist operations. Again we have

Elsasser's idea of a non-rigid, non-pervasive categorization.

Flexibility then appears as having two aspects: the first is to be seen in the 'probability'

approach, which allows for several possible combinations, the second lies in the flexibility of the

logical and organizational operation itself.

We have seen that life certainly ‘computes' and this computation may coincide at certain

times and in certain of its aspects with our univocal arithmetic and the binary all-or-nothing law.

However, we have also seen that in regard to its richer aspects it proceeds according to equivocal

computing, and that imprecisely. Now here we have to suppose that the imprecision is not

merely in our understanding: self-organizational logic deals with and manipulates imprecise

objects, 'fuzzy sets', and it deals with them in an uncertain and oscillatory manner. 'Fuzzy sets'

are classes of objects in which the transition between belonging and not belonging is gradual

rather than abrupt. This is the case with living things, the transition between them and the

ecosystem being imprecise. Itis also the case with objects which undergo change in the self-

organizational process and transform the operations which transform them.

The logic of complexity can therefore be conceived as a logic which, in certain of its

operations, works on what is fuzzy, and that in what is itself an imprecise manner. This

characteristic seems alien to our logic, but in point of fact it forms a part of our reasoning. Zadeh

rightly stresses the fact that the logic which underlies human reasoning does not reside in the

traditional two-valued logic, but is on the contrary a logic characterized by fuzzy truths, fuzzy

connecting links, fuzzy rules of inference (Zadeh, 1973). In my view Zadeh makes a mistake

when he reduces our logic to this exclusively fuzzy logic. Actually it is a combination of two

logics, as we shall see. He also makes a mistake when he confines this fuzzy operation
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 242

exclusively to human reasoning. Human reasoning, at its particular level and with its particular

elements, also proceeds on an empirical basis by using the logic of self-organization. And this

logic, like human logic, is a dialogical system, which is fuzzy in part but cannot be reduced to

the fuzzy.

Human thought, like the logic of living things, is what links the precise to the imprecise.

We cannot use language flexibly and heuristically except by associating imprecise, polysemous,

elastic concepts with precise, univocal, inelastic concepts. As Saussure observed as long ago as

1915: 'there are images which cannot be dispensed with' (Saussure, 1915, 'Introduction', Note I).

Both human thought and the logic of living things arrive at precision by means which are

imprecise, that is, by escaping from the binarity which would stop them in their tracks. It is a

'make do and mend' logic. (Indeed the whole history of life can be regarded as a gigantic piece of

make do and mend.)

The incorporation of the 'fuzzy'7 seen from this angle appears as a felicitous and

necessary complement to von Neumann's logic of probability. However, use has been made in

passing of two terms which evoke something else again: one is 'oscillatory' and the other, in the

quotation from Saussure above, 'image'. They introduce us to the concepts of oscillatory and

analogical processes respectively.

In the former case we may wonder whether what we conceive as

complementarity/competition/antagonism—and which does not represent either/or alternatives

but ambiguous aspects of one and the same reality-does not constitute the oscillatory, uncertain

and varied facets of a single self-organizational principle. Complementarity and antagonism

would be like the two poles of the organizational principle which would oscillate between them

during the continuous ebb and flow of reorganizational operations. Ambivalence would then be
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 243

the effect on our logic of these inherent oscillations. This would enable us to connect self-

organization with physical phenomena of an oscillatory nature, whose importance, not least in

cellular organization, we are coming to realize more and more.

I have no desire to enter a new field at this point. However, in view of the relationship

between the oscillatory and the undulatory, between the undulatory and the continuous, we may

well ask whether our traditional logic, which is so well adapted to digital computation, did not

reject the analogical aspect of thought because it could not be integrated in its systematics. Now,

as Saussure recalled, thought cannot dispense with images, that is, analogy. As has been noted,

cybernetics has in fact rehabilitated analogical thought. However, what has been lacking is the

consideration that the logic of living things uses quasi-analogical processes (phenomenal

evidence of this is to be found in the mimetism of certain animals). This would enable us to

conceive the processing of the fuzzy, at organizational level, by means of oscillatory/analogical

processes of whose nature I personally have not as yet the faintest idea.

A dia-logic. Let us revert to the example of human reasoning, of which traditional logic is only

one aspect. As the human brain is a biological system, it seems reasonable to suppose that it

functions with an even greater degree of complexity than that of complex biological systems.

However, reasoning by means of language is only one aspect, one function of the brain, and it

has not perhaps yet developed all its potential for complexity-indeed I am convinced it has not.

However, even now human reasoning is only partially consonant with digital logic—as is

demonstrated by the inadequacies of digital computers. It also works with the fuzzy and uses

analogical processes. It is a dialogical process in the sense that it would seem to be the result of

the symbiosis of two types of logic, one digital, the other not only using analogy as does an

analogue computer, but also analogical, it being understood that analogic remains obscure and
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 244

mysterious for us, since we have concentrated all our scientific efforts on digital logic and take

Aristotelian logic as our basis.

Now it seems already to be established that natural automata are organizations implying

both digital and analogous processes. The genes would seem to be 'digital' and, in enzymes, the

controlling functions would seem to be 'analogous'. May we not go further and assume that

beyond the analogous there are other processes of an analogical character, which would then

have to be elucidated?

This is an open question, but it introduces us to a dialogic (a term used by von Foerster).

Dialogic might be regarded as the bicephalous logic resulting from the encounter of two types of

logic; it would be the symbiotic combination of these two types of logic, a combination which

would be found expressed in simultaneously complementary, competing and antagonistic terms.

I do not know whether we can regard the combination of the probabilistic order of microphysics

and the deterministic order of the medium range of physics in this light. However, it can be

imagined that the appearance of living things, the parent ancestral cell, was due to the encounter

(pre-symbiosis) of macromolecular systems of proteins on the one hand and RNA and DNA on

the other; in that case, this symbiosis, having become a cell, is thenceforth governed by the

dialogical combination of an unstable, metamorphic, metabolic logic, that of the proteinic

phenomenal system, and a constant, self-preserving, self-perpetuating logic, that of the

generative system (DNA). The emergence of self-organization, in a highly charged

thermo-dynamic maelstrom, would then usher in this dialogic, which would thereafter control the

functioning of all the operations of the living being. This is why, as we saw earlier, it is not

possible to pick out one logical principle of life, that of 'living' in the sense of metabolizing,

exchanging, 'enjoying', eating, or that of surviving, in the sense of reproducing and perpetuating
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 245

oneself. This is why life eludes all rationalization. And this, in part, is why life, from the

standpoint of our logic, is absurd.

Now the symbiotic ability of life—once again a case of make do and mend—is

extraordinary. It is believed today that mitochondria were originally 'enemy' parasites which

were absorbed and from then on, having become co-operative, even carried out vital functions,

both metabolic and genetic ones. It is also thought that genes were brought by viruses, which

were introduced into the DNA by transduction, and there again the enemy became co-operative

and the foreign message was integrated into the genetic message, possibly enriching it in a

decisive way.

Our organisms, moreover, are alive with one-time parasites which became symbiotic and

thenceforth took over vital functions, such as the bacteria in the intestines. Within an ecosystem

symbiosis may be conceived of as mutual parasitism, producing an organizing effect to the

advantage of both species. In certain cases even, plants that exist purely for the benefit of the

parasitic insects which prey on their flowers, use dissemination, that is, the side effects of such

parasitism, to reproduce and multiply.

In its original character, therefore, as in many of its organizational features, the logic of

complexity can be conceived of as a dialogic producing a symbiosis between two types of logic,

a symbiosis which is itself complex because not only does it not nullify the competing and

antagonistic features, but it also integrates them and uses them for vital purposes. In this sense it

is understandable that complexity demands 'rivalrous adaptability' (Burger, 1967).

Dialectical logic
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 246

In many respects 'dialogic' irresistibly recalls the Hegelian dialectic, which itself claimed to be a

new form of logic. However, before going any further, we must note the inadequacy of the

Hegelian dialectic:

1. Its starting-point is monist and it does not therefore give due weight to the element of

encounter, in other words the haphazard element involved in the development of the

dialectic: it thereby eliminates chance and becomes a quasi-necessary movement which,

although intended to transcend mechanistic determinism, actually takes us back to it.

2. It sees 'sublation' as a mainstream, general phenomenon, ignoring the fact that it is in the

first place something aberrant and marginal.

3. It tends to regard 'contradiction' as a moment in sublation, to a third term, which is

synthesis; it does not therefore see that 'contradiction' plays a part in the structure or

organization of stable phenomena. The Hegelian dialectic is therefore inadequate and

even where it is adequate there is a danger of its becoming a new form of simplification

or an excuse for unbridled fantasy. However, it did already point to the need for a new

logic, the following elements of which it supplies:

a) the idea that the contradictory is to be found in all phenomena;

b) the idea that contradiction plays a generative part;

c) the idea that sublation (transformation in the direction of more complexity) is brought

about by a negation of negation;

d) the idea of a logic which is not binary but ternary.

In fact we have seen that the logic of complexity implies, to a certain definite extent, the union of

logically contradictory terms (order/disorder, etc.). In a wider sense, life is an enantiomorphous

system (enantiosis: opposition, contrariness), which in a way reconciles this contrariness and
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 247

produces unity. It is this property that was extolled so long ago by Heraclitus, the greatest

dialectician of the Western world: 'What is contrary is useful and the most beautiful harmony is

produced by warring elements.' Life is at the same time stress and the reconciling of

contradictions. It is in this sense that we must understand three assertions of which the truth is at

the same time evident and unfathomable: 'Life is always stretched to its own limits' (Simondon);

'Life is always on the brink of disaster' (Salk); 'Organisms live at the temperature of their own

destruction' (Trincher). We are back with Heraclitus once more: 'Life from death, death from

life.' It is in this sense too that life borders on the absurd. The highest reason, whether or no it is

dialectical, does not dissipate what cannot be rationalized, does not exorcise it, but contains it

in itself.

The enantiomorphous dialectic of organization existed in embryo form in Hegel's

philosophy, but Hegel, obsessed by 'becoming', had not faced up to the problem. On the other

hand, although, as has already been said, he ignored the essential part played in 'becoming' by

chance and the element of encounter, he did bring out the positive character of negativity arising

from the negation of negation. The term 'negentropy', so often deemed unfortunate by those of a

positivist turn of mind, seems to me to be particularly felicitous: if entropy is the 'negation' of

complex order, negentropy, which needs entropy to build a still more complex order, is the

negation of that negation; it is that incessant becoming working within the other incessant

becoming (entropy) and, like a magic force (Zauber-kraft), causing the (disintegrating) negative

to return to (living) being.

Generative logic

Von Neumann's logic of probability is not degenerative; it is even potentially generative (owing

to its combinatory potentialities). Dialogic is generative, in and by its symbiotic character, and
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 248

Hegel's dialectic is also generative with its ternary principle and its in-built negativity

(excessively, immoderately so). We need a new generative logic which will not only integrate all

these characteristics but take us a stage further by making due allowance for random elements,

disorder and 'noise'.

Now, in so far as generativity is concerned, in the mutational, morphogenetic and creative

sense of the term, it was Gottard Gunther who brought out the innovatory significance of the

'order from noise' principle. In this case there is actually a further conversion of disorder into

order, what was 'noise' in a generative system being transmuted into a constitutive part of that

system. This transmutation brings about a disorganization/reorganization of the message/sys-

tem which changes the structure of the pre-existing order: the conversion of disorder (in the

system), of 'noise' (in the message) into order/message changes the self-organization of the

system, which is complexified. From the systemic stand- point it is the transition to a

metasystem; from the paradigmatic standpoint it is a change in the paradigm; from the logical

standpoint, it is a 'transjunction' which modifies the distribution of the system of values. Whereas

'order from disorder' (statistics) concerns only the distribution of individuals, 'order from noise',

in this sense, governs the distribution of values. Truth and error are transposed. For this reason a

mutation, an 'error', in the reproduction of a genetic message seen in relation to that message,

ceases to be an error and becomes a 'truth' of the new system. But of course there is no 'truth'

unless the new system is viable. Otherwise the error remains an error. In this way we get the

possibility of a 'theoretical' treatment of error to which von Neumann referred. What he is

speaking of is not just a capability for getting round or correcting errors, but in cases of

mutation/generation the possibility of transmuting them.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 249

And here the problem of error becomes part and parcel of the great Heraclitean enigma:

'Life from death and death from life.' For self-organizing systems would be potentially undying if

they were not fatally, statistically subject to the inevitable accumulation of errors since there is

no communication system in the physical order which is free of 'noise'. It is therefore because

sooner or later they cannot escape errors that they die. However, just as negentropy manages to

work on mortal disorder, transforming it into order, similarly it manages to treat error in such a

way as to make of it a new truth-very seldom no doubt, but in a decisive fashion. Thus the

notions of truth and error shift and change. They remain logical concepts, but cease to be

unchangeable ontological essences. They become bio-degradable, but also bio-transformable.8

Arborescent logic. Symphonic logic

The logic of living things cannot according to Gunther be a two-valued logic, but is necessarily

an n-valued logic. Even if this is true, it is again only one aspect of the logic of complexity,

which is at the same time probabilistic, dialogical, dialectical, generative. The term 'generative'

covers the lot provided that generativity is conceived of not as a linear phenomenon but as an

arborescent phenomenon. The logic of life is arborescent and it is because it is arborescent that

evolution has a non-linear, arborescent character, as Darwin discovered.

The image of the tree is a good one, but it is still too static. We must realize that a logical

connexion is 'a choral symphony with organ'. We must understand what the poet understood, that

logic is the realm of the unexpected and not that of what is foreseen, which is tautological. Many

people cannot imagine that logic should imagine. Many cannot conceive that logic should create.

Many still cannot understand that logic should astonish—and that it must astonish us when we

consider the whole amazing system, suffused with logic through and through.9 However, we

have here a problem which is untouched upon as yet. Can we pass from the relativization of our
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 250

Aristotelian logic to the formulation of a broader logic? Or are we forever tied to Aristotelian

logic? In which case the logic of complexity will forever elude our attempts to reduce it to

reason, in other words it will remain a-logical. At all events the concept of logic seems to be

losing its character of an absolute norm, either remaining stunted and relative, or opening out

onto the ambiguous, the contradictory, the aberrant, the creative.

Notes
1. Copyright 1974 by the International Social Science Journal (UNESCO). Reproduced with the

permission of the International Social Science Journal.

2. By 'medium range' we mean the sum of physical phenomena to which the laws of traditional

physics apply.

3. The more highly a living being is evolved the more autonomous it will be, the more it will

draw on its living ecosystem for energy, information and organization. But for this very

reason it will also depend more on its ecosystem. A living being is thus at the same time

autonomous and dependent and the more autonomous it becomes, the more dependent it

becomes. It is therefore self-organizing without being self-sufficient. This ambiguity, which

rules out any idea of a closed entity in so far as living beings are concerned, the latter being

'open systems', brings us up against another aspect of biological complexity, the complexity

of the ecosystemic relationship.

4. For him the question was not purely academic: He also wondered how one might build up

such an automaton, that is, an artificial being, which would then have a fundamental

advantage peculiar to living beings. The creation of an artificial being which would have the

characteristics of a living being is not an impossibility to be dismissed. What distinguishes a

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 251

living being from a machine is not the artificial character of the machine but the insufficient

complexity of our technological know-how.

5. There are, of course, species in which death is probably 'programmed' in advance, that is

built into the self-organization. But here too the death of individuals would inevitably have

occurred in any case as a result of the accumulation of errors.

6. An ant-hill, of which the organization has been remarkably described by Remy Chauvin, pro-

vides an example of very great over-all coherence, in spite—and because—of very great

disorder in the individual behaviour of the ants. There is good reason to think that the very

high level of 'noise' in such a society is not unrelated to the extreme complexification of

certain ant-hills, which practise stock-farming and agriculture and even cultivate drugs.

7. Imprecision, so long the object of anathema in mathematics and science, is now seen as a

vehicle of progress, with the theory of fuzzy sets and the need for 'imprecise concepts'

being recognized by cyberneticists such as Abraham Moles.

8. Of course what is involved here is the truth and error which are internal to a system and

which become relative and capable of transmuting from one to the other. The problem is

quite different in regard to the environment. An error of judgement or perception concerning

a cunning or delusive predator or an enemy taken as a friend remains an error; and a factual

truth (for example, that Napoleon existed) remains a truth.

9. To us a logical connexion is a choral symphony with organ, a work so difficult and inspired

that the conductor must call on all his resources in order to control the performers. Logic is

the realm of the unexpected. Thinking logically means being continually astonished. (Osip

Mendelstam.)

References
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systems theory (pp. 165-169). New York: John Wiley & Son’s, Inc.

Atlan, H. (1972). L'organisation biologique et la théorie de l'information. Paris: Hermann.

Auger, P. (1966). L' homme microscopique, p. 164-71. Paris: Flammarion.

Bachelard, G. (1966). Le nouvel espoir scientifique (9th ed.). Paris: PUF.

Brillouin, L. (1962). Science and information theory (2nd ed.). New York: Courier Corporation.

Burger. (1967). Agonemmetry (adaptability through rivalry). General Systems, No. XII, p. 211.

Chauvin, R. (1969). Le monde des fourmis. Paris: Pion.

Elsasser, W. M. (1966). Atom and organism. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 89(1), 131-150.

Von Foerster, H. (1960). On self-organizing systems and their environment. In: Yovits and

Cameron (eds.), Self-organizing systems. New York: Pergamon.

Gunther, G. (1962). Cybernetical ontology and transjunctional operations. In: Yovits, Jacobi and

Goldsteiner (eds.), Self-organizing systems. Washington, D.C.: Spartan Books.

Jacob, F. (1970). La logique du vivant. Paris: Gallimard.

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Lwoff, A. (1972). Réflexions sur le cancer (Courrier du CNRS, 4).

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Santiago, Chile. (Mimeo.)

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Morin, E. (1973). Le paradigme perdu: la nature humaine. Paris, Le Seuil.

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Illinois Press

Salk, J. (1972). Man unfolding. New York: Harper.

De Saussure, F. (1915). Cours de linguistique générale. Paris: Payot.

Schrödinger, E. (1947). What is life? New York: Macmillan.

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York: Consultants Bureau.

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 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 254

Chapter 9: Organization and Complexity1

The universe, in its diversity, has atoms; molecules; stars; galaxies; and—at least on one small

planet—living organisms, humans, and societies. These 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 objects of our world in an organized way. To

reach 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 according to a primary

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. Dilthey2 stated: “A whole

cannot be understood except by understanding its constituent parts, which cannot be understood

except by understanding the whole.” Two centuries earlier, Pascal3 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 between the concepts of organization, interrelation, and system.4

These three terms, although inseparable, can be distinguished from each other. The concept of
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 255

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

characteristics 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 something concrete.

In any case, we need a concept in three, three concepts in one, a macro-concept, each

constituting a definable aspect of the same world, but that we subject to the hegemony of the idea

of organization.

Organization is a notion that is dependent and at the same time independent of its

constituents. The relative autonomy of the ideal of organization is illustrated by isomers,

compounds with the same chemical formula and molecular weight but with different properties

only because the atoms are arranged differently in the molecule. We know that differences

between atoms are the result of differences in the number and structure of three types of particles

and that the diversity of living species depends on differences in the number and structure of four

basic elements that form the letters of a “code.” We immediately see the importance of

organization if it changes the qualities and character of systems or entities consisting of similar,

but differently structured elements.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 256

Organization gives the entity autonomy and stability, at least within certain limits.

Autonomy is derived from stability, and stability proceeds from autonomy. It is therefore not a

mere exercise of the mind to distinguish an organized entity in relation to its environment.

Organizational stability is ensured in a fixed way by the chemical bonds in molecules, but in the

stars, stability/autonomy is guaranteed by an antagonistic complementarity between implosive

and explosive processes. As we shall see, the maintenance of autonomy/stability is a primordial

problem for living beings, who preserve it by continuous regulation and reorganization.

Unitas multiplex
The relatively autonomous and relatively stable entity that organization produces, maintains, and

preserves, is a complex unit, simultaneously one and multiple: unitas multiplex. This holds for

the atom, the star, the living being, and the social unit.

The idea of multiple units embodies two mutually exclusive notions. The concept of unit

renders homogeneous and breaks up multiplicity; the concept of multiplicity divides unity into

compartments and breaks it up. Hence the organized entity is one and homogeneous from the

point of view of the whole, and different and heterogeneous from the point of view of the

constituents.

What we have to understand are the complex characteristics of the unitas multiplex: it is

a global, nonelementary entity, because it consists of different parts. It is a nonhomogeneous but

hegemonic unit because the organized whole dominates the distinct elements and holds them in

its power. It is a nonprimitive but original unit: it has its own irreducible properties. It is an

individual unit, quite indivisible: it can be decomposed into separate elements, but this changes

its existence.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 257

Organization contains the seeds of its own disorganization. Maintenance of the complex

unit presupposes the existence of dissociative forces. Binding forces contain or presuppose

forces of repulsion. The parts that undergo organizational constraints bear the virtuality of their

acquisition of autonomy in relation to the whole; this happens when the constraints relax or

break down, destroying the organization, as occurs in cells that evade the constraints of the

organism and proliferate in a disordered manner as a malignant cancer. Finally, the whole

organized entity tends to a condition of disorder, according to the second principle of

thermodynamics. Everything that is composed tends to decompose. However, in the more

complex organizations, self-organization maintains homeostasis by means of negative feedback

(elimination of deviations that threaten the stability of internal complexity) and uses the mortal

effect of the forces of disintegration to regenerate itself. A living organism ceaselessly degrades

its energy; this degradation would be irreversible if its autonomy did not permit it to draw on

energy from outside to produce new molecules and young cells to replace those that decompose.

Hence anti-organization is not just antagonistic, but necessary to organization.

Moreover, the organizational constraints of the whole cause division in the great living

and social polyorganizations, between the universe of the parts and the universe of the whole.

None of Marc Antony’s cells (50–100 billion in number), none of his organs, knew that he

declared love to Cleopatra, and Marc Antony knew nothing about the life and functioning of his

cells: there was mutual ignorance at the heart of indissoluble unity.

Thus the idea of unitas multiplex acquires density of meaning when we understand that

we cannot reduce the whole to its parts or the parts to the whole, or the one to the multiple or the

multiple to the one, but that we have to try to conceive the notions of whole and parts, one and
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 258

different, organization and anti-organization, together, in a way that is simultaneously

complementary and antagonistic.

Emergences
All organizations produce something beyond their components, considered in an isolated or

juxtaposed way: (a) the organization itself; (b) the global unit constituting the whole; (c) the new

qualities and properties emerging from the organization and global unit. These can be called

“emergences”.

As indicated by von Foerster, the rule of composition of elements that interact in

organization is super-additive (super-additive composition rule, see von Foerster,5 pp. 866–867).

It is now important to extrapolate the qualities or new properties that emerge with

organization at global level. They are qualities or properties of an innovative character with

respect to the qualities or properties of the components taken separately or structured differently

in another type of system. Thus the atom has original properties, such as stability with respect to

the particles that compose it, and it imparts this quality of stability by feedback to the labile

particles that it unites. With regard to molecules, “the new species bears no relation to the

primitive constituents: its properties are not the sum of theirs, and it behaves differently in all

circumstances. Though the mass (the total quantity of matter) remains the same, its quality or

essence is completely new” (see Auger,6 pp. 130–131).

The mixture of two gases, ammonia and hydrochloric acid, produces solid ammonium

chloride. The apparently banal but in fact complex example of water shows that its liquid

character (at normal temperatures) is not due to the properties of the atoms but to the molecules

of water, bound together in a flexible way.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 259

The association of an atom of carbon in a molecular chain brings about stability, an

essential quality for life. As far as life is concerned, “clearly the properties of an organism are

more than the sum of the properties of its constituents,”7 and clearly the living cell has emerging

properties unknown to macromolecules outside biological organization: it feeds, metabolizes,

and reproduces. These emerging properties, the group of which is what we call life, affect the

whole because it is a whole and affects the parts by feedback because they are parts. From the

cell to the organism, from the genome to the gene pool, complex organizing units with emerging

qualities constitute themselves.

Finally, the implicit or explicit postulate of human sociology is that society cannot be

regarded as the sum of all the individuals that compose it, but as an entity with specific qualities.

It is quite extraordinary that apparently elementary notions, such as matter, life, sense,

and humanity, are really emerging qualities of complex organizations. Matter only has

consistency at the level of the atomic system. Physical materiality is not the first quality but

emerges in and through organization. Life emerges from living organization, AND living

organization does not emerge from a vital principle. The sense that linguists look for in the

depths of language is the emergence of discourse, which appears in the unfolding of global units

and has feedback on the basic units that made them emerge. The human being is an emergence of

a hypercomplex brain system in an evolved primate. To define man in opposition to nature

means defining him exclusively on the basis of his emerging qualities.

The surprise is that the emerging qualities of a basic system, the atom, become the basic

elements of the molecules, the emerging qualities of which become the primary elements for cell

organization, and cells become the basic elements of multi-cellular organisms, and so forth.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 260

Emerging qualities have feedback on the parts and give them qualities that they could not

have if they were isolated from the organizing whole. Thus, the neutron acquires the qualities of

duration in the nucleus, electrons acquire the quality of individuality in the atom under the

organizational effect of Pauli’s exclusion principle. The cell creates the conditions for the full

development of molecular qualities not seen in the isolated state. In human society, culture

enables individuals to develop their aptitudes for language, crafts, and art; their richest individual

qualities emerge within the social system. Thus we see systems in which macro-emergences have

feedback on their parts, creating micro-emergences. The whole is not only more than the sum of

the parts, but the part of the whole is more than the part by virtue of the whole.

The idea of emergence contains the closely linked ideas of quality, product (the

emergence is produced by the organization of the system), globality (because it is indissoluble

from the global unit), and innovation (because it is a new quality with respect to previous

qualities of the elements). Quality, product, globality, and innovation are therefore the notions

that need to be connected to understand emergences.

An emergence has something relative (with respect to the organization that produced it

and on which it depends) and something absolute (in its innovation); it must be considered from

these two apparently antagonistic points of view.

The emergence is a new quality that arises once the system is constituted and therefore

has the property of event. The emergence presents itself as irrefutable phenomenon. It is

empirically irreducible because it cannot be reduced to the qualities of the organized elements. It

is not logically deducible because it cannot be deduced from the sum of the qualities of the

organized elements. The new properties that arise at cell level are not deducible from their
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 261

molecules. Hydrogen is irreducible and non-deducible to its constituents, crystals to their

constituents, living organisms to their constituents, intelligence to its constituents, awareness to

the constituents of the brain. Even when it can be predicted from the conditions in which it

arises, the emergence constitutes a logical leap and opens the gap in our minds through which the

irreducible can penetrate. The emergence forces us to revise the notion of qualitative leap.

How do we classify emergence? Sometimes it seems to be an epiphenomena, product or

resultant, at other times the main phenomenon constitutes the originality of the organized entity.

For example, if we consider our awareness, it is the global product of brain interactions and

interferences, inseparable from the interactions and interferences of a culture on an individual. It

is possible to conceive it as an epiphenomena, a flash like a will-o’-the-wisp, incapable of

modifying programmed behavior (genes, urges, society, etc.). Awareness can also rightly be

viewed as a superstructure, resulting from deep organization that manifests in a superficial and

fragile way, like all that is secondary and dependent. Such a description, however, does not

consider that this fragile epiphenomena is at the same time the most extraordinary global quality

arising from the brain: self-reflection, through which “the I emerges from the brain.” This

description also ignores the feedback of awareness on ideas, behavior, and being, and the

revolution it causes (awareness of death). Finally, this description ignores the completely new

and sometimes decisive dimension that the self-critical attitude of awareness can bring to

personality.

The feedback of awareness may be variably uncertain and cause modifications of variable

degree. Awareness manifests as a pure epiphenomena, a superstructure, a global quality, capable

or incapable of feedback, depending on the moment, conditions, individuals, the problems faced,

and the urges aroused. However, more than anything it is the supreme and richest product of the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 262

human intellect, and its value is related to its fragility, like all that is best and most precious to

us: love, understanding, the primary virtues. The soul and the spirit are complex virtues,

phenomena of wholeness, emergences; and this is why they cannot survive death, which is the

disintegration of the whole and dispersal of the parts.

Thus the concept of emergence is not reduced by those of superstructure, epiphenomena,

or globality, but entertains necessary relations, oscillating and uncertain, with them. Its very

irreducibility and this undefined and dialectic relationship make it a complex notion.

The complexity of the notion of organization

With the idea of system and organization, things are no longer things; and objects, enriched by

complexity, are no longer merely objects.

Organized objects not only obey an external universal order, they produce, in their

structure and specific configurations in space and time, their own organizational order. They

often arise with the collaboration of disorder and have to struggle not only against external, but

also against internal disorder.

Organization binds, forms, transforms, produces, maintains, orders, and renders

autonomous. It cannot be reduced to structure. Structure only means rules of invariance and

transformation in a system. Organization means structure, relation to wholeness, specific

characters, relations between the whole and the parts, unity–multiplicity, and emergences. The

idea of structure mutilates the idea of organization, strips the idea of system, enucleates the idea

of complexity. The more complex the organization, the more the idea of structure becomes

inadequate. Hence, it is in anthroposocial hypercomplexity that this small region of

organizational truth presumes to erect itself a throne. In biology, the current dominant concept

makes genes govern organization, whereas genes are an institution in self-organization.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 263

There is a primordial epistemological interest in the notion of organization. Organization

opposes separability (that breaks up the complex unit) and reducibility (which suffocates the

microlevels); hence organization itself cannot be reduced to “holism,” which suffocates the

microlevels of the constituent parts. In its complex nature, it is a key linking concept: it institutes

multiple unity, establishing inseparable complementarity between the idea of unity and the idea

of diversity or multiplicity, which originally repelled and excluded each other; it establishes a

circular relation between the parts and the whole, the whole and the parts, hence the need for

circular understanding from the whole to the parts and vice versa.

The whole is more and less than the sum of the parts: this pseudoarithmetic formula

suggests that the whole produces qualities unknown to the isolated parts, namely emergences,

and at the same time establishes constraints that suffocate qualities and render virtual certain

possibilities of the parts. Hence the whole is not necessarily superior to its parts if, for example,

like a totalitarian empire and the nations it dominates, it inhibits the qualities of the parts that

were richer than those of the whole, or if the richer emergences belonged to the parts, as for

example awareness, which emerges in individuals but not in society. Extending this idea to the

cosmos, it really seems that “some small parts of the universe have a greater reflective power

than the whole” (see Gunther,8 p. 383). We have also noted the importance of the idea of

emergence from the logical point of view.

The idea of organization invokes the concrete quality, not only of an object, but in the

case of organizations perennially self-producing and self-organizing, of a being. As we have

said, only things that are organized can be known as beings, and the idea of organization is

therefore of ontological importance. The organized being, and especially the self-organizer, is a

“dasein,” “to be there,” hic et nunc, depending on an aleatory environment and subject to time
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 264

the transformer; thus we come to the idea of existence, which is the condition of living beings in

a universe where there is risk, danger, and probability.

Hence the organization is rooted in physis (the physical world), but at the same time it

draws from the observer-inventor who isolates it relatively in a tangle of organizing–

disorganizing feedback mechanisms and a web of systems one within the other (see Méthode 1,9

pp. 139–141). The idea of organization, like that of system, is physical for the feet and mental for

the head.

It is understandable that science, based on the reducible, the simple and the elementary,

reacted against complexity of organization. It is understandable why the concept of organization

was ignored and that of system avoided and neglected. Very few specialists have introduced

complexity into the definition of system.

The main issue is that the notion of organization induces us to use a number of

“connection keys,” which will be increasingly necessary as we load organization with

complexity. On the one hand we can predict a break with linear thought and a need to use

feedback and self-production cycles, like the need for circular understanding to establish the

relation between the whole and the parts. On the other hand, we are induced to tackle logical

complexities in the identity of the multiple unit, the product–producer, and the nondeductible

condition of the emergence. All this leads us towards dialogic, a principle of knowledge that

conceives the complementarity of antagonisms, such as in the relation organization–

disorganization.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 265

The complex notion of organization allows a great advance in understanding, but this

advance opens onto a great cosmic mystery: why does organization, and not just disorder or

order, appear in our universe?

Basic complexity
Organization is a complex basic concept of universal importance. The increase in organizational

complexity manifests itself through an increase in the number and internal variety of the

constituents and through a process of complication of internal structures. Beyond a certain

threshold, when the physico-chemical organization of a complex of macromolecules, for

example, can no longer take on more variety, then a more complex organization that becomes

self-organizing emerges and makes new qualities emerge: the qualities of life.

We will be able to consider the specific characters of the different types of self-

organization when we have clarified the connection keys, especially recurring cycles and

dialogic10.

Notes
1. Original copyright 1999 by the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. Reproduced

with the permission of the Annals. Morin, E. (1999). Organization and complexity. Annals of

the New York Academy of Sciences, 879(1), 115-121.

2. Dilthey, W. (1947). Le monde de l’esprit. Paris: Aubier.

3. Pascal, B. (1897). Les pensées. Paris: L. Brunschvicg.

4. In some cases, the idea of network seems more pertinent than that of system, in the sense that

a system tends to have well-defined borders, whereas a network has limits that vary. Both,

however, are interconnections of elements of an organized nature. As well, a network can

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 266

become a system by closing on itself (Internet) or by acquiring an organizing center (the

railways). For me, the primordial and common character is organization.

5. Von Foerster, H. (1962). Communication Amongst Automata. Am. J. Psychiatry 118, 866–

867.

6. Auger, P. (1966). L’Homme Microscopique. Paris: Flammarion.

7. Jacob, F. (1965). Leçon inaugurale faite le vendredi 7 mai. Paris: College de France.

8. Gunther, G. (1962). Cybernetical ontology and transjunctional operations. In Self-organizing

systems. Yovits, Jacobi & Goldstein, Eds. Washington, D.C.:Spartan Books.

9. Morin, E. (1977). La Méthode 1, La nature de la nature, [Method. 1. The nature of nature].

Paris: Le Seuil (coll. Points).

10. Some passages have been modified from the section entitled "Organisation" of Méthode 1

(pp. 94–151: pp. 104, 105 multiple unity; pp. 106–108 emergence). To complete the

examination of the notion of organization, the reader is referred to the following passages,

not used here: particularly pp. 112–114: “the whole is less than the sum of the parts,” pp.

115–123; “organization of the difference, complementarity and antagonism,” pp. 123–144.

The concept of system, particularly pp. 126–129: “All is not all,” pp. 129–136; organization

in organization, pp. 138–144; beyond formalism and realism, pp. 150–151.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 267

Chapter 10: RE: From Prefix to Paradigm1

Translation by Frank Poletti and Sean M. Kelly

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.

Part I: From the RE of Physics to the RE of Biology

Toward a Radical Conceptualization of RE

The idea of active organization is synonymous with permanent (or continuous) reorganization.

As we have seen,2 all machine-beings,3 from stars to living individuals, organize and reorganize

themselves in and through the repetition of processes, the renewal of components, and the

restabilizing of stationary, or homeostatic, states. Each permanent reorganization is,

simultaneously, a permanent regeneration, in the sense that the continuous re-immersion of being

and existence involves a permanent recursion, which is necessary to the production of that being.

We find the prefix “re” in all of the following terms: reorganization, recursion, repetition,

renewal, restabilization, and regeneration. In what follows we will explore a much more radical

conceptualization of “re.” I will start by proposing a macro-concept described with the capitals

letters “RE.”
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 268

Even at first glance, the root concept RE appears surprisingly rich. It includes at once:

 the idea of repetition (and multiplication);

 the idea of re-beginning and renewal;

 the idea of reinforcement;

 the idea of communication (or connection) between things that otherwise would be separated

(as in the words re-unite and re-ligion).

The root concept RE, much like the root concepts explored earlier in this book— autos

and oikos—is a term so fundamental that it must be conceptualized in a manner much more

radical (<L. radix =“root”). In other words, we must think of RE not as a prefix but as a

paradigmatic concept that informs all our thinking. And as it turns out, RE is ultimately at the

root of both autos and oikos. Autos and oikos are what they are because they both fundamentally

involve reorganization, regeneration, and recursion.

Two concepts described in this book, self-organization and eco-organization, in their own

way, are both fundamentally modes of re-organization. On the other hand, as noted by Gaston

Richard, RE only takes form in and through autos and oikos. RE is at the root of these roots

because their roots are rooted in it.

The Meaning of RE in Physics

The RE of physics is a fundamental category for understanding natural machines. Yet, it is

through the quality of RE that natural machines can be differentiated from artificial machines.

Certainly, the latter involve a certain degree of organizational repetition that allows them to

produce a series of objects and products. They also involve retroactive loops. However, the RE

in artificial machines is merely phenomenal and never re-generative. Such machines do not
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 269

repair or re-produce themselves; they are produced and reproduced by humans. The ontological

divide between the artificial and the natural can thus be described as follows: in artificial beings,

RE concerns only the production of actions, effects, and objects; in natural ones, RE concerns

being, existence, and selfhood.

RE Takes and Gives Life

The category of RE is even more fundamental, rich, multiple, polyscopic, and diverse, when we

consider its work in life. These are the original characteristics of the living RE that I want to

highlight in relation to physically generative vortices and loops, without forgetting that living

organization itself involves vortices of chemical inter-reactions and genesic [génésiques] poly-

loops as well.4

Let us consider the human organism, which from the outside appears as a substantial

body. In all cases, it is a stable homeostatic machine that maintains its forms, structures, and

identity invariantly for decades from birth up through adulthood. Nevertheless, we know that the

homeostatic forms and structures of this body are each maintained by the beating heart, by

pulmonary respiration, and by circulation of the blood, which in fact regenerates both the beating

heart and respiratory oxidation.

Each beat of the heart and each breath contribute to spreading nutrition and to

detoxification, that is, to regeneration that permits continuous reorganization at the cellular and

molecular levels. Without this regeneration and reorganization, the body would irreversibly

decompose. This means that the marvel of invariance and stability that is our body must in every

instant be re-started. The body depends on cyclical processes, which are reiterative, repetitive,

regenerative, and reorganizing.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 270

If we consider now the innumerable interactions among thirty billions of cells and among

thousands of billions of molecules that constitute our body, we discover that these interactions

are not limited to the conversion of energy. Instead, they constitute and maintain a living

framework, which in contrast to rocks, wood, and concrete, would collapse and decompose if it

did not reconstruct itself incessantly. On the microscopic scale, the body continuously loses its

substantiality and fades into astonishing electrical vortices in which certain states endure only for

milliseconds. Certain enzymes catalyze hundreds of millions of chemical transformations every

second. A marvellous turnover annually renews almost all the molecular components of our

organismic structure. Every time we celebrate a birthday, our body contains but one percent of

the molecules of which it was composed only a year ago.

Our cells themselves are constantly carried away by these vortices of activity. With the

exception of our nerve cells (whose macro-molecules are renewed ten5 times in the course of a

human life), our cells decompose and are incessantly renewed. Most cells live only a few days

(such as in the skin and internal intestinal tract), whereas others live a few weeks (such as the red

globules, which live for 120 days).

Even our mental life is not a rock of stability in the midst of the vortices of RE. Each

idea, strategy, representation, and day-dream must be re-membered. All conscious experience

demands the return and reflection of our subjectivity/objectivity on itself and to itself.

While all of this is occurring, there exists the other face of RE, which is a multifaceted

process of re-pair/re-welding of fragments of broken DNA that are used to restore and heal the

wounds and lesions suffered by our organs. Finally, every individual being takes part in a cycle

of re-production, where the genos generates and regenerates itself. Even the concept of species
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 271

involves RE. It is reproduced by the same—or almost the same—in the other, indefinitely, to

infinity...

RE is everywhere: the soul of the genos assumes multiple forms at all levels and in all the

aspects of autos and oikos. And as we shall see, it is at work in every society too. Without pause,

RE operates in each act of micro-organization and in the totality of living poly-organization. RE

repairs, restores, reconstitutes, reconstructs, refabricates, reproduces, renews, reorganizes,

regenerates, and recommences. It works to carry away debris in its vortices, its circuits, and its

recursions. It is at work at all levels: in the billions of atoms in each cellular being, in the

millions of cells in each multicellular being, in the millions of individuals that comprise each

species, and also in the composition of ecosystems and societies...

RE is generalized, polyscopic, microscopic, and macroscopic. It operates in each

individual entity and in each organized totality. Far from being a prefix, RE is the very root of all

these living processes. It is evident in the energetic renewal of organisms that require rest as well

as movement. It is evident in the high instability of the organic proteins of organisms, whose

potential for degradation is demanded by actions and transformations that the organisms require.

It is evident in the enormous self-destruction that happens each second in each particle that

exists.

Constant destruction is thus the complement to an ongoing self-reconstruction. In each

instant, everywhere and always, unheralded work re-starts life by putting in motion billions of

Sisyphuses. We realize the nature of something in the physical universe that is truly irregular and

rare, when reflecting on the constancy of RE. This something called life has proliferated on the

planet earth. It is determined even though it is physically marginal. With each breath, each
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 272

movement, each computation, life incessantly produces new living beings, new individuals, and

new subjects...

Everything in the universe disperses and disintegrates—everything—but particularly

living machines made of instable components. This is especially true of living organization,

which comprises as much disorder as chance, especially in such fragile and ephemeral living

beings, which possess living individuality/subjectivity, and are so singular, so improbable... Yet,

these aspects of the universe persist, resist, perpetuate, fortify, restart, and renew. Life produces

itself through the most beautiful illusion that we can imagine. Wherever there is incessant

renewal with eddies, circuits, cycles, and constant reproductions, we see the opposite: stability,

fixity, permanence, invariance, regulations, and law. And we understand this optical illusion. It is

the continuous repetition, reiteration, regeneration, and reorganization of events and actions that

cause, at least in the mind of the observer, the impression of an invariant pattern and order,

which transcends these phenomenal agitations that feed incessantly on themselves.

The Living Order (as A. Lwoff called it in a 1960 book by the same title) that is imposed

on our perception and intellect would vanish if it were not constantly produced and reproduced.

Invariance is the product of uninterrupted dynamism. Rest is produced by frenetic work.

Continuity comes from constant discontinuity. Individuality is always ephemeral, and endurance

is founded on the return of the precarious. All productions and reproductions of order depend on

physical dynamism and on chemical interactions. They follow the encoded instructions of the

universally present genetic memory, which contains in itself the potentiality of restarting,

redetermining, and reproducing itself. Even while the rotation of the earth around the sun obeys a

general gravitational law (a formula that applies to all interacting material bodies), truly living
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 273

reiteration must generate and regenerate itself without respite by means of engrams and

programs associated with the computo.

Part II: From Repetition to Recursion

There are five central characteristics that comprise RE:

1. Repetition

Repetition is the most general category for the concept RE. It is present in all productive

intercellular processes in the form of doubling and replication. It is also present in

cellular self-reproduction in the form of the duplication and splitting of its whole being.

Repetition is also present in the form of reiteration, or the reutilization and reconstitution

of the same pathway or process (that of a circle, cycle, or loop). Repetition thus includes:

 the backward turning of causality (retroaction);

 the backward turning of time (in genetic memory, reproduction of the prior, return to

the arché);

 the re-introduction of self-computation and self-reference.

We can note that all of these forms of repetition are interrelated and indissoluble. Most

importantly, we can note that they are not tautological but constructive. Thus, negative

retroaction (or feedback) is necessary to each regulation, homeostasis, and

reorganization. Likewise, genetic re-memorization is constitutive of each biological

reproduction. And psychological rememorization is constituted by each cerebral

representation.

2. Re-Organization, Re-Production, Re-Generation

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 274

With these three concepts we can see the characteristically machine-like quality of RE.

Permanent reorganization—which is indispensable for understanding natural machine-

beings and therefore every living being—possesses in life superior qualities and

properties, because it possesses a genetic memory, and an auto-centric computo, with the

ability to repair–restore degraded or injured components (including DNA).

Regeneration is reorganization on the plane of being and existence. Reproduction,

in contrast, exists on multiple levels:

 the intra-organismic level (reproduction of the constantly degrading constitutive

elements, such as molecules and cells);

 the intra-species level (reproduction of individuals belonging to a species);6

 the intra-social level (reproduction of processes and of individuals that comprise a

society).

3. Re-Memorization

It is worth noting that the qualities of repetition, reorganization, reproduction, and

regeneration cannot be separated from praxic re-memorization (the reproduction of an

individual starting from genetic memory). This is especially so in the case of neuro-

cerebral and psychic organization.

4. Reflection

In short, there are no known activities of organization, production, or memorization

involved in a living being that are able to do without the computo—that is, without a self-

referential reflexive circuit, which passes from self to self.

5. Recursion
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 275

If repetition is the more general category for describing RE, then recursion is the richer

one. Recursion gives to repetition a dimension not merely additive and multiplicative but

also genesic and formative.

Recursion is a process whose effects and/or products are necessary to its own

generation and/or regeneration. In other words, the generated products are indispensable

to generative production, and the determined effects are necessary to their own cause.

This means that recursion is a circuit that forms an unbroken loop of generation and

production of itself (until death breaks the loop once and for all). Thus, recursion gives a

clearly constructive quality to the cycling loop, which, otherwise, would be a simple

circuit. As was discussed in Method I,7 recursion is indispensable for the concepts of

self-generation, self-constitution, and autos. It is central to the formation and

maintenance of organization. It is central to being and living existence.

The idea of recursion allows us to conceive the indissoluble character of

organization and reorganization at the heart of self-organization. Self-organization

generates self-re-organization, which regenerates self-organization. Living organization

is an organization that re-organizes itself from itself. It is also a reorganization that

organizes itself from itself.

As we have seen, self-organization/re-organizationinvolves a recursive

relationship between genos, phenos, and ego. This means that RE is not only a prefix that

precedes the term of organization but is inherent to the loop itself. It is this loop that

constitutes the idea of self-(geno-pheno-ego)-organization. And because this self-

organization is necessarily embedded in eco-organizational loops, it is RE that links in a

circuit the following terms:

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 276

Insert Figure 30

This circuit of loops allows for emergencies, which are themselves

organizationally recursive. The movement of such loops turns and turns without pause,

stretching from intra-and intercellular chemical eddies all the way to human

consciousness.

RE should not be conceived as mere repetition in the manner of an artificial

machine, which refabricates the same thing again and again, as with a photocopier. In

life, the circuit that runs from the same to the same results in movement, work,

generation, and the mobilization of computational/organizational potentials. RE creates

being and existence. RE is based in repetition, but to reduce RE to repetition irreducibly

flattens the real complexity of RE. Ultimately, RE must be based on a type of recursion

that is simultaneously generative and regenerative, organizing and reorganizing. RE

functions in thermodynamic processes and chemical interactions. RE is the

computational, informational, and communicative activity involved in extremely complex

systems. RE need no longer be conceived as repetitive mechanism. It is central to the co-

production and co-product of all that is living and alive (See Figure 31).

Insert Figure 31

Part III: Poly-RE

Insert Figure 32 6
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 277

Autos signifies the organization of the same by the same, of itself by itself, and of another of

itself by itself. Autos thus involves in its conception: repetition, reiteration, doubling, splitting,

circuiting, cycling, reproducing, reorganizing, and regenerating. In this sense, autos is

synonymous with RE. It is also synonymous with SE, a term that implies the idea of a circuit

from self to self [“se” is the French reflexive pronoun]. When SE manifests as an individual

subject it takes the form of ME, because the subject is constituted by the circulation between I

and me.8

We can thus propose a formulation of complementarity and transformation from one term

to the other:

Insert Figure 33

These terms are synonymous, yet also distinct. They contain and embrace one another.

They overlap each other, and they are inseparable. In this sense, the link autos–RE is more

original and intimate than the link autos–oikos. Autos and RE are two sides of the same coin. In

fact, each exists in the reiteration, reorganizaiton, and recursion of a living process, which

simultaneously resists and destroys autos. Paradoxically, autos dies to live.

Insert Figure 34

Living RE actualizes a memory. It fabricates new events, forms, and structures from the

procession of past events, forms, and structures. So, in the sense of the grand diaspora of time,

living RE revives in the present fragments/islands of a dead past. Each “programmatic” and

“instinctive” action is in this sense a memory of the past that makes life. But the individual does
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 278

not have access to these memories, and a large part of our lives is thus constituted by

unremembered memories...

Thus, each self-organizing process that seems to be only the execution of a program and

maintained by a status quo, in fact displays a repetition that is a resurrection. To be resurrected is

to be the bearer of renewal. The return of the old in RE is not separate from the springing forth of

renewal. In life, each egg is hatched completely new. The uninterrupted renewal of our

molecules and cells is simultaneously our own renewal. We become younger moment by

moment, but because our cells work so hard to rejuvenate, we end up getting old.

The many aspects of RE involve simultaneously: a reactivation of the ancestral past, a

production and reproduction of present existence, and arrangements for the future. RE always

includes a return to the past that resuscitates it in the present. By this movement, RE catapults the

past toward the future.

Thus, we have reached the nexus of complexity that is the actual character of RE: the

uninterrupted return to the past (retro) and the uninterrupted movement toward the future (meta).

As the wheel of RE turns in time, it advances the wheel itself...

Insert Figure 35

The circuit Insert Figure 36 is a circuit permanently in the present. The present is the agent of

exchange between the past and future, in which retro is transformed into meta. Thus, contrary to

a simplified and linear vision of time, past and future are interwoven together in and through the

actual. The “yet again” returns in the hic et nunc. It is at once “the same” and “the new,” which

can transform itself into something new.

Insert Figure 37
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 279

The dialectic of RE is not limited to the production of renewal. It can welcome what is novel as

well. Such novelty can proliferate only through continuous memory, that is, with the process of

RE. In this respect, we come to information theory: information can only be encoded and

transmitted in, through, and with redundancy (repetition, the already known). Thus, after a

mutation, generative novelty encodes itself in genetic memory and is transmitted through a cycle

of reproduction (where it itself becomes RE). The chance discoveries, morphogeneses, and

metamorphoses of evolution are encoded in the reiterative loop of RE, which is modified in the

process. Some discoveries, including the ones that led to the emergence of mammals and

hominids, are inseparable from regressions to an archaic type, which is to say an amplification of

retro.

Thus we have, between the concepts of retro and meta (between conservation and

innovation), a complex and circuitous link in which these concurrent and antagonistic terms are

also complementary. In this sense, each evolutionary transformation is a victory of both

conservation and innovation.9

Neither Eternal Return, nor Death Instinct (Thanatos)

Within the irreversible and disintegrating movement of time, RE constructs a rotating time that is

reiterative but eventually progressive. RE contains in itself not only restarting and renewal but

also the eventual openness to innovation and transformation. Thus, it is important to distinguish

the living RE from two concepts with which it is likely to get confused, Nietzsche’s eternal

return and Freud’s death instinct.

We have already excluded the concept of eternal return from our universe, with the

rejection of perpetual motion.10 Certainly, we cannot deny that our cosmos is subject to

alternations of expansion and contraction. That is, the universe may know periodic re-
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 280

beginnings, and even new mornings. But we also cannot reject the possibility that each

successive universe that reforms itself in and through heat will be the exact repetition of the

previous one. Just as we cannot exclude the possibility that you the reader are one of billions of

billions of identical selves reading this article that appears exactly the same in each one of these

universes. Like this article, you will remain singular and unique among the infinite series of

universes, which does not exclude the possibility that you simultaneously participate in other

universes that are held in the bosom of what might be called the Pluriverse. Life embedded its

cycle of RE on a planet that turns and turns untiringly on its own axis and around the sun as well.

But we know that the earth, the daughter of 4.5 billion years of evolution, has not always turned,

and it will not go around the sun forever. Our earth will grow old and die in its due course.

Finally, we know that the rotation of the self-revolving quality of life (its multiple uninterrupted

re-beginnings) is also a diaspora of transformations, diversifications, and unheard of divergences,

which stretch from kingdoms to species and to families. We also know that there have never

existed two bacteria, two lizards, or two elephants that are exactly alike. The cycle of retro–meta

is not a pure, or vicious, cycle. Instead, it is a spiraling circuit that moves along each time that it

turns back on itself...

The other potential impoverishment in our understanding of RE stems from the link that

Freud established between repetition and the death instinct, stemming from his theory of

neurosis. If the specificity of a neurosis started from the incapacity to avoid the fascination with a

traumatic event (namely by unconsciously and incessantly repeating the same situation), then

this repetition must surely mean defeat. Thus, here is born exactly the idea that is behind

repetition: actions operating self-destructively toward the death instinct.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 281

Certainly, as we have seen,11 each organization contains in itself some elements of anti-

organization, or of “negativity,” and has a potential for self-destruction. Moreover, each living

being nourishes its own death even as it nourishes its own life. In a certain sense, each life works

for death, which works for life.

But even life’s eventual preparation of death is nothing but a byproduct of RE. Death

itself, however, results only when RE comes to an end. Freud ignored the recursive, generative,

organizing, and productive nature of living repetition (RE). In fact, the living RE (repetition and

recursion) is the survival instinct, which is necessary for any development or unfolding of life.

Certainly, when the computo is blocked, when it cannot offer an emancipatory strategy, it

becomes a prisoner of stammering and random repetition. This repetition appears as a failure of

decision, and it is the effect of a compulsive and computational blockage (like a broken record)

that impedes the spiral of development. This means that RE can consistently support, carry

forward, and inwardly repeat a stress, lesion, or wound. Such blockages can appear at the level of

heredity (for example, a “genetic defect” is repeatedly transmitted to descendants until it is

dispersed or diluted), or at the level of the individual (where past traumas return to traumatize the

present). Thus, we must emphasize that a complex conception of RE, containing the possibility

for meta (which is to say, for intervention), also contains the potential for degradation. We see

this when the survival instinct is blocked, broken, or merely mechanical.

Faced with a new critical situation, only the new can save life. But this new, which

breaks out of RE, is embedded within it and therefore simultaneously transforms and conserves

it.

Spiral RE
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 282

Thus, living repetition is neither the Eternal Return nor the Death Instinct. It is always a return,

and it cannot postpone death.

1. The Return Works by Not-Returning. As we have seen, “The re-beginning is a spiral

movement, which moves away from its source each time it returns.”12 The living re-

beginning appeared in a space–time that simultaneously incinerates and organizes itself.

Life is born after many formative spiral rotations of nebulae and stars; among many of

these is found our sun. Life is embedded in a cyclical rotation of the earth around the sun.

As the earth rotates on its axis, it never finds itself in the same point of our universe. Life

forges itself in the midst of these cycles and it finds itself in harmony with the return of

the year, with the change of the seasons, and the passing of days and nights. Human

societies, even those furthest from the natural rhythms of life, always attune their

calendar and clocks to the sun, moon, and planets. Yet, our social time, even more than

biological time, is carried away by the irreversible course of the cosmos.

2. Return and Irreversibility are Two Sides of the Same Coin. Irreversible time is made of

singular events that are never totally identical. Cyclical time is made of identical

repetitions. Biological order corresponds to the production of a reiterative time embedded

within an irreversible time that begins from and with events of an irreversible time. There

is nothing in organization, or in the behavior of a living being, that is not subject to

contingency and process [qui ne sois ´evenementiel], but, in each genetically

“programmed” act, structural and serial repetition unify and mix with contingent, fleeting,

and singular events. Each living being is a unitary event, yet it is still produced and

reproduced in the cycles of RE. Each irreplaceable and autonomous individual-subject is

nevertheless the child of return, repetition, and re-beginning.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 283

3. Innovation is Inscribed in the Return That it Transforms. As we have seen, everything re-

begins de novo, with a possibility for the new. Contrary to the cyclical rotation of the

earth, life works revolutions into its revolutions, and thus produces evolution. Evolution

is at once a break from repetition, through the upwelling of the new, and the

reconstitution of repetition through the integration of the new. And it is by transforming

itself evolutionarily—that is, developmentally— that life has survived the adversities that

otherwise would have annihilated it. This seems to be the truth of Freud’s concept: it is

necessary to escape from repetition to respond to chance, perturbations, and trauma. But

it is also necessary to restore repetition by integrating into its being the acquired

development.

The spiral of time takes the shape of reiteration and re-beginning, of displacement and

drift, of transformation and development. Thus, irreversible time, repetitive time, and spiral time,

have something in common in and through RE. The regenerative cycle of life, the infernal course

toward death, and evolutionary proliferation are indissociable from one another.

While everything proceeds through drifts and dispersions, RE tirelessly revives fragments

of the lost past, restarting tirelessly the history of life, transforming dispersions and drifts

(without these dispersions and drifts ceasing) into dissemination and diversification. RE

eventually transforms the new into repetition and renews repetition through evolution. And thus,

everything re-begins, and everything continues. Everything changes and evolves. Nothing is ever

the same due to:

Insert Figure 38

Permanent Revolution
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 284

Given that our societies are auto-eco-re-organizing, the more complex conceptualization of RE

that has been developed in this chapter allows us to say a few clarifying words concerning the

process of social conservation and revolution.

As we have seen, conservation of the same demands renewal and, eventually, innovation

in order to respond to new situations. These innovations, or reforms, in the external or internal

conditions of transformation can be profoundly conservative.

Revolution must not destroy the reiterative cycle of RE, but transform it. Although

revolution is inscribed in the orbit of RE, it is also capable of modifying that same orbit.

Revolution cannot be integrated into a single RE. In such cases, it would be integrated into what

it wants to transform, and it would transform itself by being integrated into conservation.

Revolution must permanently trigger its own re-beginning. That is, it must permanently

give rise to its own regeneration, its own RE. If revolution cannot feed on its own resources, then

it will be condemned to waste away or to return to the old order. Or, worse still, as so often

happens, it will consolidate this order. Because it lacks its own foundations, it will seek out

consolidation in the deepest and most obscure foundations of the old order, thereby consolidating

this order. The return to the old order saves the new power structure and kills the revolution,

which becomes reactionary. Thus, the old order always devours revolutions that cannot find in

themselves self-regenerative virtues, and thus revolutions devour themselves.

A revolution that pretends to emancipate, and pretends to contribute to liberty and

complexity, cannot be anything other than permanent revolution (according to a memorable

formula)—not permanent agitation or tumult, but the permanent re-supplying from its own

sources, which become regenerative. Everything that is new must incessantly re-start, re-

construct, and re-generate itself. And it can do so only by inscribing itself in what has been,
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 285

without being reabsorbed into a repetition of the old. Nothing human or social can escape from

this law, not even, and especially not, a revolution.

Thus, revolution must at once integrate itself and not be integrated into the old repetition.

It must permanently arouse its own re-beginning without altering the fundamental loops of:

socio-(geno-pheno)-eco-re-organization. The conditions of revolution, as with those of creation,

are founded on the unity and antagonism of retro and meta,of arche´and morphogenesis...

Conclusion: Complex RE
Biological knowledge has always revealed to us the phenomena of repetition, reiteration, cycles,

renewal, and so on, at the heart of living organization. Biology has incessantly utilized the prefix

“re.” The term reproduction is key to an entire current of biological thinking.

As we have seen, the prefix RE not only concerns reproduction but is also associated with

all concepts concerning living organization. Furthermore, RE is not merely a prefix that supports

diverse concepts. It is a conceptual radical that branches out into diverse notions. As a whole,

these ramifications and branches constitute the complex macro-concept of RE.

Conceptually, RE is:

 Radical—it is at the root of all concepts that display repetition, renewal, and recursion.

 Multiple—because it diversifies into multiple concepts, for which I have traced only a

summary and insufficient scheme.

 Total—it applies to all phenomena and levels of living organization.

 Global—it concerns life as a whole. And finally, RE is complex.

RE is one, yet also plural/diverse/multiple. By containing and uniting the disjointed and

simplified notions of retro and meta,of old and new, of events and structures, these notions
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 286

become associated in a way that is at once indissociable, aleatory, complementary, concurrent,

and antagonistic.

The notion of RE is impoverished, if all that is repeated is ruled by the principle of formal

identity, where the same is reduced purely and simply to the same. But this identity formalism

ignores that the same is an other and that the return of the same is a re-beginning. It is necessary

to understand that RE is at the heart of two morphogenetic masterpieces of living organization:

the reproduction of another being and the self-production of the quality we call subjectivity.

This means that RE should not only be conceived according to an egalitarian reduction to

the same, but also in terms of the production of alterity. RE must be conceived not only in terms

of repetition and copying, but also in terms of reorganizing, regenerative, and reproductive

complexity. It does not only face the past, because it effects a circuit and exchange among

past/present/future. Thus, the most reductive term of all—the same—reveals to us its creative

face.

But to properly understand its creative face, we must conceive RE inside an indissoluble

paradigm of biological organization:

Auto-(geno-pheno-ego)-eco-re-(retro-meta)-organization

In this way, we do not risk isolating, reifying, or hypostatizing RE in a sort of

Zauberkraft (magical force). Instead, we raise RE to the rank of paradigm.

And thus the process we describe as auto-(geno-pheno-ego)-eco-re-organization is the

only one, to our knowledge, that can compute its recursive loops. It is the only one that by

repeating itself can multiply itself, as well as spread, disseminate, and transform itself, and thus

burst out into myriads and myriads of spirals of auto-, eco-, and socio-organization. These spirals

always inscribe themselves in a mega-poly-spiral, that of the biosphere. And while in that larger
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 287

spiral, they operate on and feed off of decadence, degradation, and disappearance. They feed off

of the death of individuals, populations, species, evolutions, changes, and amazing developments

of the vegetable and animal kingdoms, including those that led to Homo, the being that lives in

the anthropo-social sphere, in which an almost inexorable potency of re-beginning and

regeneration maintains and feeds human society. And all of this is carried along by the broken

spirals and re-beginnings of evolution and the irreversible time of history...

Notes
1. Reprinted from World Futures: The Journal of General Evolution, 61, Morin, E. Re:

From prefix to paradigm. 254-267., Copyright (2005), with permission from World

Futures and Taylor and Francis.

2. Morin refers the reader to pp. 209–213 of the foundational volume of his Method series,

The Nature of Nature, which has been translated into English by Joseph B´elanger. All

page references to it in this article are to Belanger’s translation.

3. In Pour sortir du xxe siècle (Seuil, 1981) Morin states that “every physical being whose

activity includes work, transformation, production can be conceived as a machine” (p.

156). Artificial machines are merely the last in a long line of these “machine-beings,”

beginning with the sun and including the earth itself, its organisms, and anthroposocial

organizations.

4. The neologism “genesic” is developed in Method I, where Morin describes the

constructive and generative power of disorder with the phrase “genesic disorder.”
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 288

5. Genetic reproduction is not only the reproduction of beings; it is also the self-re-

production of the cycle of reproduction itself, in other words, the reproduction of

reproduction.

6. Method I, pp. 183–184.

7. In this short section Morin introduces two new terms. The first, SE, is explored in Method

I where he treats the physical “self,” the organizational precursor of what will emerge as

the living autos. The second, ME, prefigures what will emerge, after a certain threshold of

complexity has been crossed, as the conscious ego (“moi” in French).

8. Morin refers the reader to chapter 4 of Part II of La Vie de la Vie, in which he describes

in detail the arising of subjectivity in living systems. In particular, he addresses the

analogy between Descartes’s cogito and Morin’s proposal of computo, which is the

cogito of the biological realm.

9. Morin indicates that he will address the problem of evolution directly in his yet to be

published Devenir du Devenir [The Becoming of Becoming].

10. Method I, pp. 66–70.

11. Method I, pp. 119–120.

12. Method I, p. 333.

References
Lwoff, A. 1960. L’order biologique. Paris: Laffont.

Morin, E. 1981. Pour sortir du xxe siècle.Paris: Editions du Seuil.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 289

Chapter 11: Beyond Determinism: The Dialogue of

Order and Disorder1
Translation by Frank Coppay

The past is fixed once and for all, but the future, to a large extent, is free, fluid.

— René Thom

Personally, I am not very fond of the monotheistic view of the world. I prefer the polytheistic

view, infinitely closer to reality. It is founded on the idea of conflict, according to which

formative or informative principles are at work in the real world while opposing themselves

constantly. This view is much more fruitful than that of a monotheistic and rational universe

where everything is established once and for all.

— René Thom

No debate can be purified of the moods, manias, obsessions — one might go so far as to

say acrimonies — inherent to the debaters. There could be no “pure” debate, that is, devoid of all

subjectivity and affectivity. Nonetheless, it is often the case that temper, arrogance, the spirit of

inquisition (denunciation of pernicious or injurious strayings) are parasitic on the debate, choke it

or transform it into an armored clash, and this in the very heart of the arena which onlookers

believe to be asepticized and rationalized: that of scientific debate. Still more astounding is the

inability to imagine another’s point of view: thus I remain dumfounded to see, in the account of

the Chomsky/Piaget debate on the innate and the acquired (Théories du langage, théories de

l’apprentissage, Ed. du Seuil, 1979), that, in hundreds of pages, the two champions, followed by

their true-blue Chomskyans and Piagetians, each remain blind to the position and argumentation

of the other.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 290

What should undoubtedly be necessary, wherever dazzling empirical proof is lacking to

close off the debate, which is nearly everywhere, is that each debater, rather than naively

ensconcing himself in the heliocentric seat of all truth, have an awareness of the subjective,

cultural, historical conditions in which any debate emerges, and, what is more, try to resolve the

difficulties of dialogue between two minds or points of view, especially when they represent two

universes paradigmatically alien to one another.

That awareness was obviously lacking in René Thom, whose temperament invented a

phantasmic “popular epistemology” ostensibly dedicated to the “outrageous glorification of

chance.” If there were a popular epistemology, it would be the one that identifies science with

the promulgation of the laws of nature, of society, of history. If there is a “popular” dogma

related to science, it is indeed that of universal determinism.

In fact, we see that the term “popular” serves to designate/denounce a “wrong”

epistemology relative to the right one which, itself, is “raced,” since it stems from the “race of

true epistemologists.” Jupiterian, Thom excludes Bachelard from the true/right epistemologists,

but includes Popper and Kuhn (who, under his interpretation become “products ... of Anglo-

Saxon scientific philosophy”). Thus, he sets himself up on the epistemological throne, becoming

the typical representative of that puerile and arrogant epistemology à la française whose debility

he denounces. Here, as elsewhere, the naive pretension to exclusive scientificity is the mask of

irrationality.

Uncle Thom’s Empty Cabin

Thom invents out of nowhere a common trait fundamental to the “underlying

philosophies” of Monod, Atlan, Prigogine/Stengers, myself: “All [these philosophies]

outrageously glorify chance, noise, fluctuations, all make randomness responsible, either for the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 291

origin of the world... or for the emergence of life and thought on earth.” Now, each of the authors

singled out tries to conceptualize the association and cooperation of randomness and

determinism: each, in his own way, brings out the importance of factors of order that intervene in

any birth, constancy and consistency of organization. As far as I am concerned, I write (thus

differentiating myself from Michel Serres’s adventurous exclamation: “Yes, disorder precedes

order and only the first is real.”2), “What is real is the conjunction of order and disorder,” and I

say that the problem of all modern knowledge is to conceive this conjunction (La Méthode, Ed.

du Seuil, v. I, p. 75). One can therefore see that the Thomist vision of what he thinks is the

thought of what he thinks are his adversaries “proceeds from a certain mental confusion,

pardonable in writers of literary formation, but difficult to excuse in men of science who, in

principle, have been trained in the rigors of scientific rationality” (Thom, “Halte au hasard,” Le

Debat, 3, p. 120).

Let us tackle the problem: Thom opens, in a particularly bizarre way, a particularly

interesting debate: “What is the present state of the problem of determinism?”

He sees in determinism a self-evident reality and not a philosophical category, a clear and

simple concept, and not a notion whose acceptations have been variable and whose meaning has

evolved (cf. on this matter the article “Determinism” by Balibar and Macherey in the

Encyclopedia Universalis) from the absolute mechanical determinism of Laplace to the

probability theory of today. He sees, in any re-opening of the case on determinism, an incompre-

hensible weakness or misguidedness, whereas it is the century-long development of the physical

and biological sciences that provokes this re-opening. As a theologian persuaded that, without

faith in God there is no longer any morality, he imagines that, without faith in determinism, there

is no longer any scientific will to find out. Well then, if it is true that the myth of universal
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 292

determinism has been and ultimately still can reveal itself to be heuristic, it is no less true that the

initial questioning of the matter (mise-en-question), as in the works of Bohr or Heisenberg, has

been shown to be just as heuristic. What is heuristic is not only ideas, but also the conflict of

ideas. What is heuristic is re-examination, including the re-examination of a re-examination.

On this account, we can see that Thom is interested, not in the problems posed by the

encounter between theoretical idealities and empirical phenomena, not in the dialogical and

conflictual conditions of the development of knowledge, but in the sovereignty of ideality. For

him, scientific knowledge reduces to and is quintessentialized in formalization. The underlying

postulate of this “Thomism” is that the entire plane of reality is algorithmizable. As a matter of

fact, the most admirable discoveries of scientific thought have been formulations of algorithms.

But can we not ask oursevles whether there do not exist, in the real universe, things which are

non-algorithmizable, non-reducible, non- unifiable; that is, things which are uncertain,

unpredictable, random, disordered, antagonistic?

From that moment on, does the problem of knowing become, not to eject and repress

uncertainty, unpredictability, randomness, disorder, antagonism outside of its royal domain, but

to seek dialogue with them?

From the Simplicity of Determinism to the Complexity of Order

Let us not forget that the problem of determinism has changed over the course of a

century. Correspondingly, the idea of determinism has become richer and more supple. In place

of the idea of sovereign, anonymous, permanent laws directing all things in nature there has been

substituted the idea of laws of interaction, that is, laws depending on the interactions between

physical bodies that depend on these laws. Thus, gravitation does not govern material bodies: it

governs the relationships between material bodies, and, without physical bodies, or before their
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 293

formation,3 there are no laws of gravity. There is more: the problem of determinism has become

that of the order of the universe. Order means that there are other things besides “laws”: that

there are constraints, invariances, constancies, regularities in our universe. The idea of order is

richer than the idea of laws, and it permits us to understand that constraints, invariances,

constancies, regularities depend upon singular, or variable conditions. Thus, it is the peculiar

conditions of the genesis of our universe that determined the constraints, which in turn

determined the appearance, selection and stability of certain particles, from which rules or laws

of interaction between these particles were constituted. Thus, in place of the homogenizing and

anonymous view of the old determinism, there has been substituted a diversifying and evolutive

view of determinations. The order of the universe is self-produced at the same time that this

universe is self-produced starting from physical interactions: thus, it was not possible for there to

have been electromagnetic, gravitational, nuclear interactions before the appearance of particles.

But from then on, in and by these interactions, there come to be constituted organizational

determinations proper to the structure of given systems (nuclei, atoms, molecules, stars, living

organisms), that is, determinations which do not exist outside these organizations.4

Better yet: we see that biological order, that is the invariances, constancies, rules,

regularities peculiar to living phenomena, was not able to be constituted until after a long and

marginal physico-chemical evolution, and under the temporary, local and precarious living

conditions which are those of our planet. That order, therefore, is neither absolute, nor eternal,

nor unconditional. It is the product of a particular and deviant evolution in the confines of a small

planet of a suburban sun, and, if there is life on another planet, it would be equally peculiar,

marginal, provisional there.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 294

So we see that the order of the universe is not only the producer (or rather, as we shall

see, the co-producer) of organizational phenomena. It is simultaneously the product, and it

increases, develops with the development of organizations. We see that beside and beyond the

“laws” of nature, there are the conditions of their appearance, existence and continuation. We see

that there are “laws” which demand to be ceaselessly produced and reproduced, and which

furthermore develop and are modified, such as those that control the living order.

But we also have to see that if the order develops at the same time as the organizations,

the latter (nuclei, atoms, molecules, suns, living organizations) are formed with the cooperation

of disorder (disturbance, random encounters). This is indeed von Foerster’s principle

characterized and distorted by Thom as “order through noise.” Von Foerster does not engage in

an outrageous praise of chance. He shows that the encounter between a few elementary

constraints and some non-directional energies produces new forms of organization, that is, in so

doing, develops order.

On Disorder
Here, it is necessary to define this idea of disorder, which, to my way of thinking, is

richer than that of chance. Just as order is not identified with the determinism of general laws

governing nature, disorder, though it still includes it, is not identified with randomness or chance.

Disorder is not a notion symmetric to order. It is a macroconcept5 which, while still containing

the idea of randomness, can include sometimes the ideas of disturbance and dispersion,

sometimes the ideas of perturbation or accident (relative to a functioning operation, an

organization), and, when it is a matter of an informational/communicational machine (such as the

living machine), the ideas of noise and error.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 295

Now, disorder burst into the physical universe, along with thermodynamics, as heat, that

is agitation, dispersion, degradation (of energy), and it invaded the cosmos as soon as the latter

was conceived as the end product of a sort of initial thermal accident/event. More radically,

disorder secured itself in microphysical individuality, not only in the atoms or molecules of a

gas, but in all subatomic particles, whose behavior is random, that is, unpredictable for an

observer.

Randomness, as Thom correctly remarks, is defined negatively: “A random process is

one which cannot be simulated by any mechanism nor described by any formalism.”

Randomness, as Chaitin says, is “that which is algorithmically incompressible” (G. J. Chaitin,

“Randomness and Mathematical Proof,” Scientific American, 232, 1975, pp. 47-52). Now, for us

(and I will come back to this “for us”), the physical, biological, human universe includes

randomness, which is to say that neither cosmic becoming, nor biological becoming, nor

anthropo-social becoming can be deduced from algorithms. The universe holds gaps, intervals of

unpredictability, of indeterminacy, and perhaps of inconceivability.

To be sure, the chance behaviors of individual particles, living beings, human beings can

be sponged up in a statistical conception embracing populations, and in which not only are the

traditional “laws of nature” to be found, but also new “laws of chance” are formed. But this

chance is not cancelled on that account. We have from then on a double-entry science, one

column random and the other deterministic.

But, just as soon as it becomes apparent to us that new forms, innovations, creations

appear in terms of deviances or fluctuations, as soon as the evolutive transformations of life are

no longer executed frontally or massively, but start with individuals who are deviant with respect

to the norm of their species of origin, as soon as singular events, accidents, even “errors” can no
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 296

longer be sponged away from the description of evolutionary forces —from that moment, it in

fact becomes apparent to us that the future cannot be algorithmicized, which Thom recognizes in

the lovely phrase quoted as epigraph of this article, but which originates in a more serene text

than his appeal to order (interview in Le Sauvage, “Uncle Thom’s Planet,” January 1977).

To be sure, one can consider, and especially at the level of human phenomena which are

at once physical, biological, social, cultural, and historical, that many chance occurrences are

oftentimes nothing more than the encounter of deterministic causal chains of different orders; but

that amounts to recognizing that the encounter between these determinisms is brought about in

disorder. To be sure, one can consider that the explosion of a star is physically determined, but

that explosion constitutes a disorder, and at the same time an accident, disintegration, agitation,

dispersion. To be sure, there subsists a cosmic order constituted by the universe as organized into

stars and star systems, but this order is no longer ruler of the universe: it is in the minority

compared to the unorganized matter at the core of a gigantic cloud. This order is linked, by the

same token, to the organizations that are constituted by stellar systems. In other words, it is just

as necessary that there be organization in order that there be laws of nature as it is necessary that

there be laws of nature in order that there be organization.

As a result, the old eternal/absolute order of sovereign/universal laws, the old Laplacian

determinism excluding all random happenings, all uncertainty, all bifurcation, in the past as in

the future, are dead. But not order nor determination. On the contrary, the ideas of order and

determination find themselves enriched, more pliant, pluralized. But this enrichment is effected

by associating two ideas with them, one invisible, the other repressed in classical science: (1) the

idea of organization (which permits understanding of the construction, production and

reproduction of order and different orders); (2) the idea of disorder.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 297

Order is produced in the universe from the genesic/singulary constraints particular to that

universe, from the organizing processes that are constituted within it (formation of nuclei, atoms,

stars), but these processes involve disorders (agitations, disorders, random encounters,

blowups/splits in the primeval cloud, departing from which gravitational processes will come

into play). Thus enriched, the idea of order can no longer expel the idea of disorder. It must

initiate an order/disorder/organization dialogue. As opposed to the classical explanation, which

relegated to an extra-scientific Hades everything which was not derivable uniquely from a

paradigm of absolute order, the modern explanation treats

order/disorder/interactions/organization as an incompressible paradigm. Thus, the myth of

determinism makes way for the problematics of an order turned ineluctably complex; that is,

related in a way both antagonistic and complementary to disorder, which voices its challenge-

fruitful and deadly, as all challenges—to scientific knowledge.

The Metaphysical/ontological Opposition and Methodological

Problematics
It seems absurd to associate order with disorder and to try to envisage their dialogue as

long as one remains in the lamentable alternative between two ontologies: on the one hand, a

universe whose true essence would be woven from order; on the other hand, a universe whose

true essence would be woven from disorder.

Ontologically speaking, there is conflict between two world views here. The first

postulates a universe ideally obedient to calculation, ideally algorithmizable, and which some

neo-Laplacian demon could, were he to be endowed with adequate faculties, describe in its past

and predict in its future; accordingly, the entire effort of science would be to get as close as

possible to the demon’s power source.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 298

The vision of a world at the mercy of chance, for its part, leads to a counterdemon, a

hidden God whose unpredictable whims govern the universe. Nevertheless, as soon as we take a

closer look, we see that chance poses, in and of itself, a problem that determinism excludes by its

very nature: that of the relationships between the human mind and the reality of the universe.

The problem is this: does the impossibility of eliminating chance derive from a weakness in the

means and resources of the human mind, from its ignorance, which prevent it from recognizing

the determinism masquerading behind apparent happenstance, the imperturbable order to be

found behind the perturbations of disorder? Or instead does it not convey the inadequacy of

algorithmicization, of formalization, of logic faced with the complex richness of what is real?

Perhaps there still exist many determinisms hiding behind apparent happenstance. But, perhaps

too, it is fundamentally impossible to totally idealize and rationalize the universe. It just might be

richer than the mind.

Thus chance brings us not only uncertainty as to the processes in which it intervenes, but

also uncertainty as to its own nature, that is, uncertainty as to the nature of uncertainty, and

uncertainty as to the possibilities and limits of our mind. In this respect, chance brings back to us

what the impoverished ontological determinism chased away: the problem of the human mind

faced with the phenomena it observes/conceives. There is ontological uncertainty as to the nature

of reality because there is uncertainty as to the possibilities of the human mind faced with reality.

The notion of chance, as soon as one thinks about it, calls forth the observer/

conceptualizer. The notion of disorder, as soon as it appears in the form of perturbation, accident,

disorganization, noise, calls forth the particular norm of organization against which the

accidents, perturbations, disorganizations, noise factors are to be compared. In other words,

disorder cannot be posited as an ontological absolute. Qua random occurrence it must necessarily
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 299

be related to an observer/conceptualizer; qua accident/perturbation/noise, to a question of

organization.

As a result, we are able to perceive the real domain of knowledge: it is that, not of a self-

contained universe, but of a universe viewed/perceived/conceived by a human mind hic et nunc;

that is, a universe from which one cannot exclude the human mind that beholds it; hence, from

which the problems of knowing posed by the nature of that mind cannot be eliminated. This real

domain of observations made by human minds involves the uneliminatable presence of

determinisms and randomnesses, of order and disorder, in micro-, macro-, astrophysical,

biological, ecological, anthropological, and historical phenomena. As a result, we need to leave

behind the ontological opposition between chance/necessity and consider their co-presence. As a

result, the search for determinacies, and the consideration of random occurrences, accidents,

disorders, are each necessary and fruitful. But any deification/reification of Determinism or of

Chance is impoverished and sterile. A totally determined universe is a universe where nothing

new can transpire and where the observing human mind could not be introduced. A universe

totally at the mercy of chance would be nothing but noise and fury. So then, for us, the universe

is at once order, organization, noise and fury.

We must therefore renounce the ideology/idolatry/idealism of determinism as well as the

ideology/idolatry of the god Chance. What can most likely be psychoanalyzed in the cult of

chance is an obscure desire to recapture divine grace, to be free of the constraints and servitudes

of the real order.

To be sure, determinism responds to the speculative and practical need of the human

mind: to “disambiguate” the environment, to master reality. But the myth of a totally

deterministic universe has become the ideology of mastery/ domination over nature, wherein
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 300

nothing could escape the control of the mind and technique of humans. Correspondingly, it has

become the idealistic dream of a universe which necessarily has to obey the simplist designs of

our human logic. And one winds up with a form of diaphor-rhetic idealism: whatever cannot be

formalized does not have the right to exist. The real must obey the formal, instead of having the

formal apply to the real. Thom, moreover, has in several texts made no secret of his Platonism.

In contrast, it seems “realistic” to me to believe that formality and rationality are swamped by the

richness and complexity of the real world. To renounce ontological determinism is to open one-

self to the idea that our logic, albeit necessary, is insufficient for conceptualizing the richness of

the real order.

As a result, the problem is not to divinitize or exorcize chance, but to no longer seek

idealistically to eliminate it from the world. We have to eliminate the ideal point of view of the

Laplacian demon as well as that of the neo-god Chance, the better to put ourselves in the real

perspective of social-man-living- in-the-world. We must abandon, as impoverished and dead-

ended, the idea of a solely deterministic or solely random universe. The postulate of noumenal

determinism is without phenomenal interest. It might encourage narrow researchers, but research

has no impending need to be cradled by this impoverished myth: the mystery of the universe, the

adventure of science are stimulants both sufficient and inexhaustible. We must therefore abandon

an ontological/metaphysical opposition in favor of a methodological problematics: that of

understanding a universe whose observer will never be able to eliminate disorder and from

which its observer can never be eliminated.6

Thus, we must go beyond the artless alternative of chance/necessity, order/disorder. We

must enter the field of our reality, which includes not only observation, experimentation,

conceptualization, but also the observer/co-experi-menter/conceptualizer.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 301

Certainly, the notions of chance and necessity are logically antagonistic and tend to

exclude one another. But that we see them as related, is a matter of fact. Whence the problem:

how does one express their inter-association? It is not determinism that is “fascinatingly rich”;

neither is it chance. Apart, each is appallingly desolate. What is fascinatingly rich, the real object

of scientific understanding, is the relationship(s) between order/disorder, chance/necessity. It is

the reality of their opposition and the necessity of their connection.

The Dialogue of Order and Disorder

Statistics make us juxtapose an individual micro-disorder and a global macro-order

without our being able to establish the logic of the real link existing between order and the

myriads of disorder from which that order arose. In so doing, it reveals to us the equivocality, the

ambiguity that are henceforth to be found in the notion of order and in that of disorder. Thom

puts it very well: “Chance, in principle negating all order, is subject to laws, while determinism,

very often, becomes blurred under statistical structure.” But Thom glosses over this typically

complex idea instead of making it the point of departure of a necessary reflection: the dialogue,

or rather dialogic (association of two different logics) between order and disorder.

It is not a matter of hierarchizing the order/disorder relationship by assigning the starring

role to one of the terms and a bit part to the other. Thus, in the phenomenon of fluctuation

triggering the appearance of a new structure, there is no hierarchy in either direction between the

“underlying deterministic dynamism” that models the statistics of fluctuations and the

“triggering fluctuation.” It is a question of the indispensable complementarity of two realities of

different order indispensable for conceptualizing the appearance of new forms, organizations,

structures; as, for example, the appearance of a mutant which becomes the founder of a new

species.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 302

More generally, as we shall quickly recapitulate, it is necessary, in morphogeneses [sic], to

visualize a feedback relationship

Insert Figure 39

since innovation, which involves a random aspect, will, in giving rise to the formation of a stable

structure/form, engrave itself in repetition, that is, in an organizational order which it will have at

the same time modified and maintained. Which means that, in order to visualize evolutive,

physical, biological, anthropo-social phenomena, one must first imagine a feedback loop

generating order/disorder/organization (cf. Méthode, 1, pp. 68-82). We must therefore conceive

of the (physical, biological, human) world in its constancies, regularities, repetitions, “laws,” but

also in its perturbations, accidents. We must visualize the evolutionary role of the random and

the singular. The problem of bifurcations, divergences, dispersions starting from an initial state

involving very minor deviations arises, not only in thermodynamics and cybernetics7 but

especially in biological and anthropo-social evolution, where deviations caused by

invention/innovation/creation develop into schismogeneses/morphogeneses.

Scienza nuova
As we will indicate too summarily, it is the most advanced scientific developments that

push us to get out of the lamentable alternative of order/disorder (and reductionism/holism,

analysis/synthesis, etc.), in which authoritarian simplifications are imprisoned and imprison us.

Rather than opting between two ontologies or two logics, it is a question of activating complex

thought about what is real, complexity being defined as the necessity of considering the notions

of order and disorder, of chance and necessity in their simultaneously antagonistic and

complementary aspects, as well as in relation to the problematics of organization and the

problematics of the observer/conceiver.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 303

Of course, science’s quasi-vital mission up until the end of the last century was to

eliminate the uncertain, the indeterminate, the imprecise, the complex, in order to control and

dominate the world through thought and action. But this science led, not to the universal

deterministic keystone, but to the fundamental problematics of uncertainty, indeterminacy,

imprecision, complexity. The new science—scienza nuova—in gestation is the one which works,

negotiates, with the random, the uncertain, the imprecise, the indeterminate, the complex.

Thus, as I have already indicated, it is the whole range of dimensions of physical

understanding, from microphysics to cosmophysics by way of thermodynamics,8 that tells us

that the idea of disorder is not only uneliminatable from our universe, but also necessary for its

conceptualization. This universe is subjected to processes of agitation/dispersion/degrading in its

birth and development. If it was born in an initial deflagration, one can say that it is formed as it

disintegrates. Moreover, since, in this very disintegration, it registers multiform processes of

integration, association, organization, one can say that it is in disintegrating that it orders,

organizes and develops itself. It is in turbulence and diaspora that particles, nuclei, heavenly

bodies are formed, and in the furious forges of suns that the atoms necessary to complex

molecular organizations, themselves necessary to living organizations, are formed. And all

dynamic organizations, from stars to living beings, are in an uninterrupted state—until their

death—of disorganization/reorganization, degeneration/regeneration,

disintegration/reproduction.

As far as biology is concerned, Thom is shocked that Monod accords such a large role to

chance. To be sure, Monod tends to reify/hypostatize the notion of chance. But all modern

biological thought since Mendel has found itself confronted with chance and works with chance.

Thom, true to pure logical idealist form, thinks that life necessarily had to appear on Earth. To be
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 304

sure, the encounters that gave rise to the first living entity obeyed physico-chemical laws that are

necessarily manifested in the circumstances of these encounters, but these conditions and these

encounters, were they themselves necessary? The empirical data are what cause us the difficulty:

the fact that all living beings, from bacterium to elephant, share the same genetic code and the

same unit of molecular composition, the fact that in two or three billion years on Earth we have

had no indication of spontaneous generation of life, point to the conclusion that the life form

from which we ascended was perhaps born one single time, and that we all have the same

ancestor. And up to the present, there has been no cosmic message, no sign testifying to life

elsewhere. Thus life is not only marginal, but also highly improbable, and, perhaps we will never

know, unique?

And what about thought? Did it also necessarily have to appear, as René Thom predicts

for us retrospectively, with great boldness but also in great security? Then why did it appear only

in a privileged and late-coming branch of the order of primates and of the family of hominids,

and not in plants, insects, other vertebrates? More generally:

1. Whatever might be the degree of probability that our philosophical penchant might

attribute to it, the origin of life cannot be conceived of without agitations, turbulences,

random encounters.

2. Every evolutive innovation involves random factors or events.

3. From the encounter between male and female to the combination of two genetic

heritages, all sexual organizations include and use chance, and it is these chance

conditions that bring to the individual his genetic singularity.

4. Living beings compute randomness (information) and are generators of randomness

(decision, behavior).
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 305

5. All strategies use and produce chance, from immune-defense strategy (cf. Burnett’s

“selective” theory of immunological defense) to the animal strategy of search, defense,

attack in an ecosystem.

6. All neuro-cerebral activity involves randomness in the formation of its synaptic

connections (Changeux-Danchin) and, for mankind, in dreams and imagination (without

the latter of which there is no theoretical invention, hence no scientific understanding).

7. All living beings must be conceived of in their environment, which involves innumerable

random physical events (random quantum events, cosmic rays, climatic perturbations,

telluric cataclysms) and random biological events (risk of attack by pathogens, rivals,

enemies, etc.). One can of course choose to see only the determinisms acting in an eco-

biological situation, but then that eliminates this situation along with the very situation of

all life, which is random existence in a random environment.

8. All determinisms, all determinations must be sought out and recognized.

A. But it must also be seen that any birth is improbable, that any act of sex is a

genetic lottery, that any game of love is also a game of chance, that any existence

is subjected remorselessly to risk and fortune, that any change bears the mark of

the random, that every death constitutes, not only an indeterminate fate, but an

accident hic et nunc. There is, in the sphere of life, much more order than there is

in the strictly physical sphere. But there is also much more disorder and

randomness. All life is subjected to chance, transforms chance, is transformed

according to chance, and finaly dies by chance, even though it is, up to and

especially in that death, ceaselessly determined.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 306

It is because it has sensed the fundamental importance of chance that biological thought

occasionally tends to defy it. In each progressive discovery, it has written chance decisively and

deeply into the principles that govern reproduction, individuation, behavior, evolution. And,

since the advent of Mendel, it has formulated its “laws” by integrating chance into them.

Correspondingly, knowledge of living organization progresses insofar as we understand that it is

a disorganization/reorganization which tolerates, contains, represses, integrates disorder,

including the proliferation—up to a certain threshold—of malignant cells.

As far as anthropo-social sciences are concerned, these latter have a long way to go in

understanding the determinations proper to their objective. But there it is clear that the ideal goal

of understanding is in no way limited to the extraction of “laws of society,” even better (worse),

“of history.” Such laws are extremely impoverished and involve so many uncertainties that their

legality is moth-eaten. In fact, it is a matter of myth-eaten legality: any pretension at

promulgating laws of society or of history has been and remains the “scientific” mask of

doctrinaire myth. Any pretension to monopolize social science by the pseudo-possession of

pseudo-laws of history is ipso facto not only a-scientific, but also anti-scientific. For any

pretension to monopolize scientificity, by determinism or any other principle, becomes, of itself,

my dear Rene Thom, anti-scientific.

Even more than in biological evolution, the will to understand historical change leads us

to consider, not only determinisms and determinations, but multi-causal entanglements of

different origins, the triggering/driving role of deviation, of conflicts, crises, wars (which

inevitably involve disorder and happenstance), the decisive role of moments of

hesitation/bifurcation in singular events, accidents, individuals, decisions. Once again, the

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 307

notions of order, disorder, interaction and organization must be brought into play in order to try

to arrive at the best understanding possible.

And now, let us consider the human individual, so multiply determined in its genes,

environment, culture, family, class, its habitus, its society. And yet each one of us is the chance

survivor of an ejaculation of 180 million spermatozoa; each of us is the fruit of an encounter,

perhaps probable, perhaps extremely improbable between two genitors; each of us is the result of

a lottery combination between the two genetic heritages that he unites. Each of us carries with

him the stamp of the simultaneously necessary and random events of his early childhood. And no

demon, taking into consideration the genetic heredity, cultural heritage, environmental influence

and niche in life of the newborn, could have predicted that the latter would become a

mathematician at once brilliant, impulsive and narrow. It is quite probable that by examining the

parents’ genes, the marriage rules in force, the sociocultural milieu, a demon might have at his

disposal an indispensable but not a sufficient grid for conceiving the personality of this

mathematical prodigy. As for this great mathematician’s biographer, he will try to imagine how

chance and necessity concurred in the birth of his vocation. He will, at a given moment, wonder

if confinement in mathematical ideality together with charactorial petulance did not lead him to

attribute to a mythical “popular epistemology” that which derives from scientific development

itself: the re-evaluation, shakeup and, finally, abandonment of universal determinism.

A knowledge that should know of its own ignorance

The problem that is asked in specific terms of scientific thought is a problem that arises with all

thought. Thought is not only knowledge/detection of constancies, regularities, “laws” present and

acting in nature. It is also strategy, and as with any strategy, it must not only make maximum use

of its knowledge of order, but also confront uncertainty, randomness, that is, the zones of
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 308

indeterminability and unpredictability that it encounters in reality; it must work in spite of

uncertainty, capitalize on it, utilize randomness, use ruse on adversity. In this sense, it is

uncertainty and ambiguity, not certainty and univocality, that stimulate the development of

intelligence. Zadeh tells us very rightly that the superiority of human thought over the fuzziness-

eliminating computer, lies in its ability to work in spite of and with fuzziness (L. Zadeh, “Fuzzy

logic and approximate reasoning,” Synthese, 30, 1976, pp. 407-428). But perhaps the greatest

divergence that I would have with Thom is in the very idea of knowledge. Thom, loyal to the

simplistic conception of the progress of knowledge, thinks that knowledge accumulates its

insights by dissipating darkness. Now, we have to look at what the prodigious development of

scientific knowledge shows us: this prodigious development of knowledge is at the same time a

prodigious development of ignorance. It solves riddles but reveals mysteries. The increase in

light is at the same time increase in darkness. Consequently, true progress is brought about when

knowledge becomes aware of the ignorance it brings: it is then a matter of an ignorance aware of

itself, and not a matter of the superb ignorance of deterministic idealism, which believes that a

supreme equation will permit it to illuminate the universe and dissipate its mystery.

To be sure, the introduction of disorder, randomness, and, conjointly, the

observer/conceptualizer, carries with it a limit to our knowledge. But this limit destroys only the

flat infinity of determinism, and reveals to us the grandiose infinity of the unknown. Awareness

of that limit is one of the largest conceivable advances in our knowledge, which is thereafter in a

position to work with disorder, with randomness, and can introduce in itself auto-reflection, that

is, the search for self-knowledge . . .

Let us conclude with a notion that makes René Thom “jump”: the notion of complexity.

Thom is a complex thinker because he puts antagonism, conflict,9 division at the heart of his
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 309

morphogenetic theory. In fact, complexity involves, among other things, the principled

association of two apparently mutually exclusive terms. Thom is a complex thinker who believes

himself obeying the principle of simplification. He subscribes to the ideal of an epistemology

whose mission is to expel imprecision, uncertainty, paradox, contradiction. Now, complexity

leads to working with randomness and disorder, which bring imprecision and uncertainty.

Simplificational strategies of knowledge reject uncertainty because uncertainty kills them. Just as

an anaerobic bacterium does not know that there is a richer aerobic life because it dies from it,

just as fish are unaware that air does not asphyxiate, but gives life to land animals, the simplifier

does not know that what kills his way of thinking nourishes complex thought. The deterministic

simplification thinks that it is pumping out the excreta from the septic tank of knowledge. It does

not know that it is throwing out “time’s treasure.”

Let us summarize: to think is not to serve order or disorder; it is to make use of order and

disorder. To think is not to turn away from the unrationalizable and the inconceivable. It is to

work in spite of/against/with the unrationalizable and the inconceivable.

Notes
1. Originally published by Morin as “Au-delà du déterminisme: le dialogue de l’ordre et due

disorder” in Le Débat: Historie, politique, société, number 6 (November, 1980),

Gallimard. Published in English as Morin, Edgar. “Beyond Determinism: The Dialogue

of Order and Disorder.” SubStance 40.3 (1983): 22-25© 1983 by the Board of Regents of

the University of Wisconsin System. Reproduced courtesy of the University of Wisconsin

Press.

2. In J. Le Goff and P. Nora, Faire de l’histoire. Paris: Gallimard, 1979, Part II, p. 222.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 310

3. That is, in the hypothetical very first seconds of universo.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 311

4. This idea is not only related to the currently most plausible theory of a universe born

from an initial deflagaration; it is also valid for any universe involving gensis, that is,

evolution, and we cannot see how one could go back to an immobile and eternal universe.

5. I define “macroconcept” in La Méthode, I (“La Nature de la Nature”), p. 378, and

especially La Méthode, II (“La Vie de la vie”), p. 371.

6. We cannot, in noumenal terms, imagine a universe that could produce that which, in our

faculties, emerges as order and disorder: but we can correctly assume that there is

something inconceivable in the universe, something anterior to order and disorder, and

which for my part I shall call chaos, this term signifying, not pure disorder, but an

indistinct generative source of order and of disorder.

7. The same perturbation can either be cancelled (negative feedback) or trigger

disintegrative processes (positive feedback), accordingly as it stays within or exceeds a

critical threshold in the self-regulation of a system/machine. Thus, the same causes can

have different or opposite effects.

8. The question is not to decide whether the second law of thermodynamics is absolutely

indentified with the idea of increasing macrophyical disorder; the question is to observe

that there is, in the physical univerise, a principle of agitation/dispersion/degradation

inseperable from all energy processes and which affects all dynamic organizations, from

starts to living beings, where it becomes a principle of ruin, of disintegration, and of

death.

9. “Our models attribute all morphogenesis to a conflict, a struggle between two or several

attractors” (R. Thom, Stailité structurelle et morphogénèse, Paris, Ediscience, 1972).

Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 312
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 313

Chapter 12: Social Paradigms of Scientific

Knowledge1
Translation by Frank Coppay

Part I. The Sociological Insertion of Describer and Description

In its first formalizing movement2 epistemo-logic expels the thinking subject. But the gap that

opens up at the height of logical formalization3 calls for the return of the subject.

Personal Self-scrutiny
The return of the subject in the knowledge of knowledge can take two forms, which are

interwoven, and which I separate here for convenience. The first derives from personal critical

self-examination, which concerns each individual striving for knowledge; in this case, me, and

you, the reader.

I must at the same time stress and not stress this point. Not stress it because the theme of

“Know thy knowledge” automatically flows into the theme of “Know thyself” and “Who am I?”,

and these themes are ultra-overworked, though without any great effect, and precisely without

great effect because there does not exist a way (Tao) in our culture which would be that of the

consciousness of consciousness; because the appeal to knowledge of self is more often than not

an appeal to virtuousness rather than to an indispensable form of hygiene (one of the reasons

might be that our pluralist culture relies more heavily on external criticism than on self-criticism,

which, when it appears, assumes a quite strange form). And yet the point must be stressed

because this absolute necessity of self-reflection and personal self-implication in the art of

knowing (and especially in science, so burdened with responsibilities) is totally scotomized; it is

sufficient, or so one believes, to postulate that scientific knowledge must blindly obey judgments
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 314

of “fact,” and to assume that the critical spirit goes without saying, in order that, in the rarefied

atmosphere of subject-elimination, one eliminates in the same move all the mental activities

appropriate for guiding the knowledge of the subject, which is to say that one disdains method,

by reducing it to a set of technical norms, rather than maintaining it as a problematic that

intimately concerns the subject in search of truth.

In point of fact, conscience, modesty, aptitude at correcting one's errors are talked about

in the biographies and eulogies of scientists, but never are these major considerations advanced

in the course of the research itself, as if, let us reiterate, everything subjective, including qualities

and virtues; had to be annihilated in the objective workings of science. Yet, these virtues, which

are courage, humility, imagination, and to which should be added an aptitude for self-

examination and self-criticism, are absolutely indispensable to all developments in science and

all-progress in understanding.

All researchers, all theoreticians must ask themselves the question of their personal

relation with their ideas, that is, of the relationship of their ideas to their idiosyncrasies, their

dreams, fantasies, desires, interests, respects, that is to say, everything within them that pushes

them to select and hierarchically arrange facts and ideas in such a way as to tend toward such and

such a conclusion. But such an incitement is not only a stimulus toward introspection. Let us

reiterate that introspection, banished from all sides, is nevertheless necessary. But let us also say

that it is not sufficient, or rather that it naturally changes into transpection. For, at the bottom of

the subject, there is more than the self-I; at the bottom of the ideas or the subject, there is

everything that eco-organizes it, culture and society foremost. Introspection in becoming auto-

analysis, leads once more, as does everything that is auto-, to auto-eco-analysis.

From the Analysis of the Analyzer to the Inscription of the Description

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 315

Any plunge into the subjectivity of an individual is transformed into a trans-subjective plunge,

since his most intimate dreams, the most personal self-I, his ideas of course refer back to a

neuro-cerebral apparatus (bio-anthropology); his personal psychoanalysis refers back to

collective archetypes, which oscillate between the anthropological aspect (inherent to all human

beings), the socio-cultural aspect (proper to a given culture) and the strictly personal aspect

(private-mythology, which draws from, while modifying, mythological sources of an anthropo-

socio-cultural nature); it refers back to the family and to its family, its ethnosocial group, its class

... in short, the ego, as soon as one plunges into it, becomes a microcosm, containing within itself

both the “human condition” and a situated and dated social generativity and phenomenality.

This is equally valid for all knowledge, all thought, all theory. A theory is a noo-

ideological organization which, as such, exhibits inherently anthropological organizational

features (and this goes back to what I have previously examined in the bio-anthropological

conditions of knowledge), but also sociocultural characteristics. Indeed, the problem of the

cultural, social, historical conditions of knowledge cannot be eluded. It is to the extent that

science believes itself to be a pure reflection of the objective universe that it was able to take on

hardly scientific airs of eternity, extra-temporality and extra-sociality. On the other hand, as soon

as one sees that science is not limited to pure accumulated fact, but composed of and by

theoretical systems, necessitating languages, ideas, logic, noo-organization; at that moment one

can no longer escape the idea that all our knowledge, or what is thought to be knowledge

including “our encyclopedia, our classification of the sciences, our theory of science are in

connivance with a state of society” (J. Grinevald, “Science et développement, Esquisse d'une

approche socioépistémique,” La pluralitèdes mondes, Genève, 1975, p. 37). Which brings

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 316

us back to a fundamental theorem which I have already brought out: everything that touches

upon noology, including science, is co-organized by society.

It follows that, in order to pursue the enterprise of knowing about of knowing, a sociology of

knowledge is called for, a sociology of science. From this point on and in the development that

will follow I will restrict my use of the term “sociology” to cover socio-cultural-historical

determination/conditioning. This therefore means that, when I speak about the sociology of

knowledge, I will be alluding to social reality such as I sketched it in my Socio-organization

chapter, that is, in its geno-phenomenal nature, which accords a central role to the notion of

culture and to the notion of apparatus.

Thus, the sociology of knowledge becomes a necessary component of complex

epistemology, of the knowledge of knowledge, of the theory of theory, of the science of science,

by insertion of the description and the describer. We have just seen that the analysis of the

subject, at the same time that it respects irreducible existential subjectivity, is transformed and

multiplied in a movement of re-objectification where socio-cultural reality emerges, calling for

the sociology of knowledge.

The Socio-Cultural Hinterland of Knowledge —from Bacon to Habermas

It is remarkable that the basic idea of a relationship between scientific knowledge and social

ideology was formulated at the very dawn of western scientific development only to be entirely

forgotten for three centuries. Indeed, Francis Bacon sees that scientific thought can be

unconsciously influenced by the “idols of the tribe” (proper to society), the “idols of the cave”

(proper to education), the “idols of the forum” (born from the illusions of language), the “idols of

the theater” (born from traditions). We will have to await the beginning of the 20th century in

order that, under the conquering advance of sociology as well as the inspiration of Marxism, one
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 317

begins to consider, assuredly not that the ideological be related to the sociological, but that

reason, science itself, be a part of the ideological.

In the wake, it seems to me, of a fulminous idea by Marx dialecticizing the science of

man and the science of nature, seeing in the very notion of natural object (ergo scientific object)

the product of anthropo-social activity, Dilthey had already conceived that the natural sciences

constituted an aspect of the living world of society, and this idea was to be extended, developed

and explicated in a remarkable way by Serge Moscovici, showing that to each state of society

corresponds a state of nature (Serge Moscovici, Essai sur l'histoire humaine de la nature, Paris,

196B).

For his part, continuing and sharpening another of Marx's seminal ideas, Mannheim has

shown that the sociology of knowledge had to pass through the sociology of the intelligentsia.

Unfortunately, this enterprise is still marching in place because either the intellectual class is

reduced to the bourgeoisie, from which it stems and which consumes its works, or the

characteristic property of the intelligentsia is dissolved, through failure to conceive of it in a

sufficiently complex way. I will say another word about this in a few pages.

It is in the heart of the Frankfurt School that there has been mounted a powerful and

consistent effort to link sociology of knowledge, theory of knowledge and epistemology. The

Frankfurt School is symmetrically opposed to the Circle of Vienna, and the grand Popper-

Adorno tourney illustrates the opposition. Frankfurt reinstates the eradicated subject in objective

science, unmasks the subject hidden under the object, and brings into view ideology, that is,

culture and society, that is, the new opaque object and historical subjects. Here I wish to retain

from the critical theory only what directly concerns rationality and scientific objectivity. Max

Weber has already stressed the sociological conditions on the emergence and formation of
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 318

rationality. Critical theory comes to grips with the sociologico-historical problem of reason, from

Adorno-Horkheimer´s La Dialectique des lumèires to Habermas' La Technique et la science

comme idéologie. Pure reason suddenly appears as the cover, the mask for an instrumental and

manipulative rationalization, of technologization and technocratization, themselves nourished by

objectivist science.

Science as ideology! In our terms, science as noo-organization refers both to cerebro-

organization (anthropology) and to socio-organization. But the remarkable part is not so much or

not only in its applications, technological for example; in the fear or refusal to go all the way

with the logical consequences of its premises; no, it is not only, or not so much that, as it is the

very principles of this noo-organization, in its logic and its paradigms, that science is related in

depth with culture and society. Bachelard, in highlighting the notion of “epistemological

profile,” linked this profile to the culture of a society. Kuhn, at the end of his account of

scientific paradigmatics, opens the door to a sociology of research and of scientific apparatus.

One realizes that science involves not only residues, but mythical and metaphysical

concentrations. In fact, theories carry within themselves metaphysical postulates, such as

non·determinism or indeterminacy, “the mythical belief in the comprehensibility of matter”

(Manuel de Dieguez, “Science et philosophie,” Encyclopedia Universalis 14, p. 758). Thus, the

mutual articulation of a noological point of view and a sociological point of view, in permitting

us to isolate the constitutive links that any scientific theory has with socio-organization, makes

visible to us a prime aspect of the very organization of scientific know-how, an illumination from

below...

The Sociology of Truth

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 319

Such a notion enables us both to relate and to revitalize knowledge. Between the abandonment of

a naïve, simpleness of mind, where everyone believes he holds eternal truth in the ideas of his

time, and where the scientist therefore believes in the absolutely objective validity of science,

and the acquisition of a complex point of view (which we shall continue to develop), it is even

able to flow into a pure and simple relativism; if all ideas, including scientific ideas, are

tributaries of a society and an era, then no idea is superior to another, and there is no criterion

permitting one to affirm the value, in units of truth, of contemporary scientific ideas compared to

those of the past, of other places, and of the future.

As a matter of fact, supposing that a sociology of knowledge truly did exist, which is not

the case, as I will indicate in a moment, the sociological dimension could play an

epistemological role in pointing out to us conditions favorable for the emergence of objectivity,

rationality, and truth (we have already relativized these concepts and will relativize them further,

but relativized does not mean nullified).

In principle, these conditions can be brought out: they are (a) a possibility of decentration

(with regard to one's own society, one's own culture, that is, with regard to the ideas that prevail

therein); (b) the existence of a ·plurality of points of view able to encounter one another.

These two requisites join up in a common principle: the principle of

intellectual/noological agitation, or of movement/disorder/liberty in ideas, which principle

echoes, in its own area, the grand principle of physis.

One might think that the first requirement if fulfilled as soon as there has been constituted

what Mannheim has referred to as an intelligentsia without roots, and that it would be better to

refer to it as a polycentric/ex-centric/marginalized intelligentsia, i.e., capable of decentering and

metasystemizing relative to the major prevailing values and ideas not only in society, but within
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itself. Whence, conjointly, the necessity of a great ideological plurality in the heart of the

intelligentsia, generates an uninterrupted polemic. Here we come back to a theme whose initial

explorations are well under way, but which was radicalized by Popper, when the latter made free

criticism between scientists the sine qua non, not only of progress in science, but of objectivity

itself (note here that the final basis of objectivity lies in the consensus of minds in radical

ideological conflict, that is, in the complex [complementary, concurrent, antagonistic]

phenomena of intersubjective communications). Y. Elkanna (The Problem of Knowledge in

History and - unpublished - Rationality and Scientific Change) shows that the dialectical process

must be operant not only in the heart of scientific ideas, but also in the form of critical dialogues

between scientific systems of metaphysics and competing “social images of knowledge.”

It might appear that all this amounts to saying that freedom of expression, at least in the

heart of the intelligentsia, is the primary condition for the progress of knowledge and of science.

In fact, we have been attempting both to thermodynamicize and to sociologize this proposition.

It finds itself thermodynamicized in the sense that liberty is linked here not only (or not

so much) to the possibility of expressing oneself, but also to a polycentric, pluralistic, conflictual,

“agitated” reality basic to the intelligentsia, and, doubtless, to society; which assumes a

pluralistic and unstable society, agitated by crises, that is, by circumstances favorable to the

asking of questions. But even that is not yet sufficient. The concept of conditions favorable to

knowledge in the heart of the intelligentsia must be pushed even farther. In order to accomplish

that, something which those who have ventured to envision a sociology of intellectuals have,

unfortunately, not yet done, one must perceive that modern intelligentsia is a social stratum that

conceals religious mythologies or ideologies as well as it does the critique (Aufklärung) of

ideologies and religions. Now, the Mannheimian situation referred to as “uprooting” is

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 321

insufficient to favor the progress of knowledge. It permits decentering marginalization, free-

flowing research, the possibility of forming meta-systems. But this uprooting creates a situation

of void, anguish, despair, which activates the mytho-poetic function of the intelligentsia, its

nostalgia of a grand communion, and makes it fabricate myths of reconciliation. Beyond that,

and at the same time, the uprooting situation can dispel radical problems; constitute a condition

of frivolity and absence of experience. But then, the experience of the real is also an experience

of constraints, of repression. In order that the aspiration to freedom be strong, there must be

some experience of fear and censure. So we see that the conditions for progress in knowledge are

still, not only poorly understood, but very complex and unstable, because they require both

marginality and radicality, which tend to be mutually exclusive, the same conditions for progress

being able to transform themselves into conditions of regress, so that this requires, for the

epistemo-sociologist, not only the development of a still highly apprenticed sociology of

knowledge, but, as well, always to carry out his analyses in the here and now.

The Necessity and Insufficiency of the Sociology of Knowledge

The knowledge of knowledge presupposes a sociology of knowledge; the science of science

presupposes a sociology of science. The sociology of knowledge and the sociology of science

presuppose a knowledge of sociology and a scientific sociology.

Now, in a world where communication between natural sciences and the humanities is

presumably nil, it is quite clear that there exists no knowledge of sociology on the part of

researchers, theorists, epistemologists of the natural sciences; furthermore, in no way does it

occur to these upholders of the so called objective hard sciences that the very scientificity of their

science depends on a sociological control, that is, on a necessary integration and articulation with

the science of man. And, while the researcher in the humanities sneers or gets irritated at the idea
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 322

that all human science needs natural science, so does the scientist in the hard sciences sneer, get

irritated and moreover aghast at the idea that all natural sciences need the human sciences.

But, were he to be aware of the necessity of a sociology of knowledge and knowledge of

sociology, the natural scientist would not be able to fulfill his need, because we still do not have

a sociology of knowledge, just as we still are lacking a plain old sociology. By that I mean to

repeat (E. Morin; 1973) that the discipline of sociology remains embryonic, babbling and false,

because it is not yet founded on the paradigm of complexity and on the theory of auto (geno-

pheno)-eco-re-organization. Sociology lacks both in grounding (rooting in the theory of life and

in theory of physis) and in a sense of the hyper-complexity of human society. If, in any event, a

true sociology were to be developed, it would be by integration with uncertainty, that is, through

non deterministic means.

Which is to say that, as a consequence, no sociology of knowledge could be founded on

principles of single-valued, simple and deterministic causality. Now, what has tried to pass itself

off as sociology of knowledge has asserted itself with a lamentable determinist brutality and

lamentable hermeneutic simplicity. From Hippolyte Taine to the Marxists, any problems of noo-

organization have been swept under the carpet: all mediations between the thought/theory of an

individual and the decisive criterion which one tries to “package” are crushed. The generative

reality that constitutes a culture is ignored; anything deriving from intellectual creation is

trampled; the intelligentsia is ground down. Theories and ideas become pure objects, pure

products, and tools.

To be sure, the Frankfurtians, Adorno in the forefront, have had a keen sense of social

complexity, and it is in fact in the name of that complexity that they had led the fight against

American empiricist/quantitative sociology. But, outside of the fact that Adorno himself did not,
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 323

in the matter of cultural sociology, avoid dishearteningly simplistic theses (notably on cultural

industry or mass culture), the meaning of this very rich complexity was obviously translated by

emptiness; one can say that it is the very great richness of the Adornian idea of sociology that

finally made for its poverty, or, rather, revealed the current insufficiency of all sociology. In fact,

Adorno posited the absolute necessity of relating any fact, any phenomenon, to the totality of

which it is a part, and, as it stands, he had a feeling (although never having discovered the

concept) for the fact that any totality is itself open. He thus intuited that every proposition was to

find its truth, its coherence, in a relation, an interrelation within a complex set, which is itself

open. At the same time, he had the genius to complete this proposition, basic to any mind of

Hegeliano-Marxist training, by the opposite proposition that “totality is nontruth”; that is, it is

impossible, in the state of partitioning and contradictions current to social reality and thought,

itself obliged to regress after the intellectual failure and the material success of totalitarian

Marxism, to hoist oneself up to the level of the totality, and that the only “true” awareness or

knowledge was to be found at the level of an unfinished, bits-and-pieces, fragmented description.

In that very way, by boosting critical theory to a higher level, Adorno was making himself its

gravedigger, since he quite accurately ruined all current hope for a true sociological theory. In

that very fact, he undermined the current bases of any sociology of complex knowledge.

Consequently, when he brought historical movement and sociological complexity in opposition

to his “positivist” enemies, he at the same time opposed the rich texture of social reality to a bag

of hot air.

Thus, critical theory in fact criticizes its own sociology, and all the statements about

culture at the time of the capitalism of monopolies are of a level such as to warrant the worst

ferocities of the critical theory itself.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 324

At the same time, justly concerned to avoid the platitude of a generalized relativism, and

also to save science and reason themselves from criticism, critical theory has seen itself

constrained to effect a schizophrenic dissociation in the concept of science and of reason: on one

side, instrumental rationalization and objectivist science together scotomizing the thinking

subject; on the other side, and above, in a super-position, true reason and true science. But what

is the truth of this reason, this science, to be founded upon? Frankfurt has been incapable of

formulating a meta-point of view, an ideological meta-system that would ground its theory of

reason in reason. What is worse, in its debate with Viennese positivism, Frankfurt closed itself

off to the idea that a logic might necessarily have to be integrated into a meta-theory of the

sociology of knowledge. Frankfurt has found itself blocked and has dogmatized its blockage. In

the same stroke, there was reification and absolutization of the social realm, turned foundation of

theoretical truth. But, from the moment that the truth-bearing social messiah (the industrial

proletariat) was eliminated, which is what the Frankfurtians did, the theory found itself spread-

eagle between a dual dogmatism: an idealist dogmatism that referred to a self-sufficient reason

and science; a sociological dogmatism which made society the source of all theory and all truth.

And this is where the irreducible chasm of any sociology of knowledge tempted to

expropriate the verificationalist monopoly for itself begins to open wide.

Indeed, the best conceivable sociology of knowledge, could enlighten us as to the socio-

cultural conditions which enter into the internal organization of knowledge; it could even, under

given conditions, envision the socio-culturally most favorable conditions for the development of

knowledge itself. But it could in no way determine the validity or the error of such and such an

idea, such and such a theory. Let us take an earlier example once used by Sartre to rebut Laurent

Casanova, the latter of whom claimed to refute existentialism by demonstrating (!) that it was the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 325

ideology of an intellectual middle class sandwiched between monopolistic capitalism and the

organized proletariat. Let us accept for the sake of argument, said Sartre in substance, that

existentialism is the expression of an impotent and neurotic social stratum, laminated by the class

struggle; that would not signify that this particular socio-historical experience means that

existential anguish and the philosophical investigations that it entails are devoid of sense. On the

contrary, it can be maintained that the experience of anguish and despair might be fruitful, and

stimulate the entry into cognition of very profound anthropological realities. Speaking more

broadly, a very particular socio-historical experience, situated and dated specifically, can be the

opportunity for an emergence, a revelation of hitherto invisible or occulted realities. Even here,

in the present work, existentialism has helped me not to confine the theory within the concept of

system, but rather to integrate the idea of (living) system in that of living being, instead of

integrating (dissolving) the living being in the idea of living system, where the substantive, of

itself, withers the adjective (the predicate?).

We thus arrive at a very important idea. The sociology of knowledge, complex and rich

as it may be (and, I add, for being richer and more complex, it is all the more aware) ends up

opening onto an undecidability, onto a fundamental uncertainty concerning the validity of

knowledge.

Now, in addition, we know that sociology cannot be conceived of as a closed theoretical

system. Sociological knowledge calls for anthropological knowledge, which calls for biological

knowledge, which calls for physical knowledge, which, we have seen, calls for logical

knowledge, which calls for sociological knowledge, and so forth.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 326

By the same token, Frankfurt, after having refuted Vienna, is refuted by Vienna. The void

and uncertainty of formalization called for epistemological sociologization. But the void and

uncertainty of socialization in turn calls for logicalization.

Thus, the epistemological trip that has taken us from the empirical to the logical, from the

logical to the sociological, must at the same time go forward and come back on itself. In so

doing, it must begin anew at a higher level. In the course of this trip, we have sought a grounding

for human science in the science of nature (organizationism and the theory of auto-eco-re-

organization). But that led us to the conclusion that the science of nature must be based on a

science of knowledge which is that of knowing mind. That science, therefore, takes us back to

the science of man, because the human mind, the human subject, must be understood as

anthropo-social-cultural realities; that is, the science of nature calls for a fundamental

anthropology, which calls for...

Now, in this encounter, the science of mind gives rise to a noology which itself bursts

open in a complex way: on one hand, a branch that calls for a noological science and in which

noo-organization refers us back to the theory of auto-eco-organization; on the other hand, a

branch which is logical, ideological, semiotic, linguistic...

We are thus back to the real complexity of an unheard-of interpenetration, via the

sciences of mind (or noology), between natural sciences and human sciences; at the same time,

we are led to a kind of arrangement, a mutual dependency and a dual, reciprocally satellite

rotation between natural sciences and human science, one the servant-mistress of the other, one

the epistemologization of the other, but on the understanding that they be hoisted to the

metalevel of complex epistemology. From then on, we will have to conceive of epistemology as
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 327

a circuit, but we will also be-required to consider that there is likewise a Gordian knot, where

everything is tied together.

The Paradigmatic Gordian Knot

The direction of our thinking can be considered as a sort of parade review of the multi-

determined character of knowledge. The latter always has determinations which are individual;

bio-anthropological; noo-logical, i.e. linguistic, logical, and ideological-socio-cultural, and one

could, and should add other determinations which overlap the above, such as: psychoanalytical.

These determinations reflect various pressing needs, and we have rapidly examined a few

of these. But it may also be assumed that these determinations, which coagulate and agglomerate

in any field of knowledge, thought, inquiry, that all these immediacies which interfere, are also,

in a certain way, fundamentally related in deep structure, and that the Gordian knot of these

multiple interrelations between various insistencies which govern knowledge, also conceal an

underlying nucleus where, to make figurative use of the microphysical term, strong forces are at

work, exactly those forces that maintain the organizational compactness of the nucleus.

Here, the notion of paradigm introduced by Kuhn steps in at the very heart of the idea of

knowledge and of scientific theory. In a sense, all Kuhn has done is to pick up the otherwise

well-known idea that science is not purely and simply the accumulation of factual knowledge,

but is structured by theories which, in order to structure the knowledge; bring to bear inherently

ideological structurations (which one can call metaphysical or philosophical according to one's

taste). But he showed, and herein lays his originality, that these structuring theories were

themselves, if not structured, then at least governed/controlled by a certain number of principles,

of hidden but decisive assumptions, which form their paradigms.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 328

What I would like to do now is to elucidate the notion of paradigm somewhat further,

which, as is often the case, necessitates a bit of elucidation in reverse.

As is known, the notion of paradigm in Plato meant the exemplification of the rule. From

there, the meaning has been diverted, and in the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, the term “paradigm”

has become the rule that governs the example, the principle that is illustrated via the discourses

whose generation it permits. In modern structural linguistics, particularly with Jakobson, the

paradigm is defined by complementary opposition to the syntagm, the paradigm being the system

of notions from which the constitutive elements of the discursive chain, or syntagm, are selected.

Here, I wish to define the notion of paradigm, from the outset, in a combined linguistic,

logical and ideological sense. The paradigm, in this sense, is constituted by the interrelations of

radical associations and repulsions between several key (or initial) concepts which are to orient

or govern the whole organization of reasoning and the discursive developments at the heart of

the ideologies controlled by the said paradigm.

The paradigm thus plays a chief, major, central role in all ideologies and theories. As a

principle of association, elimination, election, selection, it constitutes the internal conditions

assuring the possibilities of a discourse, a thought, a practice. Semantically, it is what

dramatically orients the direction of reasoning process. Logically, it is what relates the central

axioms of a theory to its rules of inference. It is in this combined linguistic and logical sense that

it constitutes the major organigram of a noological system (mythology, ideology, theory), as

illustrated below.

Insert Figure 40
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 329

Thus, considered in its nuclear and generative aspect, I can identify the term “paradigm”

with the organization of the organization of noo-ideological systems, including, and this is where

Kuhn's thought is important, in the heart of scientific theories.

Now, the scope of the paradigm is not restricted in theory alone: a “master” paradigm

(and we will see why later) controls the cognitive, intellectual field in which the theory arises; by

extension, it controls the practice which flows from the theory; it controls the epistemology that

controls the theory. Thus, the paradigm of reciprocal exclusion of subject and object controls not

only all classical scientific theories up to the 20th century, but all classical epistemologies as well,

up to logical positivism. It obviously oversaw the manipulatory character of science, which

projected itself of its own accord into technique, an application of theoretical principles onto

objects or beings rendered manipulable. In this sense, it is understandable that a master paradigm

in fact oversee what used to be called, here a “mentality,” there a Weltanschauung.

In the same move, we can see that the notion of paradigm assures not only a tight

connection between things linguistic, logical, and ideological; it assures a tight connection

between the linguistic, the logical, the ideological and the cultural, which generatively dominates

a whole formidable aspect of phenomenal social existence. Here, we need an enlarged view of

the notion of paradigm; a master paradigm is situated in the generative core of a culture, that is,

of a society and consequently its generative role concerns, in addition to theories, ideologies, and

practices the organization of society and its very future. It is in this extended sense that Foucault

has already defined his notion of épistémè, that is, the key paradigm which, within a culture,

defines the conditions on the possibility of established knowledge: “in a culture, at a given time,

there is never more than one episteme that defines the conditions on the possibility of established

knowledge” (M. Foucault, Les Mots et les choses. [The Order of Things.] New York: Pantheon
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 330

Books, 1971). But this central paradigm (“épistémè” if one looks at factual knowledge only,

“matrix” if one considers the praxes that develop out of the different branches of the factual

sciences) which for my part I will call the paradigm of paradigms, must be conceived of in its

multidimensional generativity. To be sure, there are different levels of paradigms, and as

Maruyama (1974: 138) correctly states, the structures of reasoning, that is, paradigms, can vary

not only from culture to culture, but also from discipline to discipline and profession to

profession, even individual to individual. But, what is going to interest us here is the central,

nuclear paradigm which commands not only a theory, but a culture as well, that is, whose radius

of organization simultaneously spans noology (linguistics, logic and ideology), praxis, and the

organization of society.

Here, we again encounter the key problem of socio-organization, the latter of which is

assured by/through cerebro-noological interrelations between individuals and the noo-cultural

crystallizations, rules, norms, models, prohibitions, know-hows, branches of technical

knowledge of which the ensemble constitutes a culture. Thus, it seems natural that a nuclear

noological reality - the paradigm - should also be a nuclear socio-cultural reality, placing itself at

the common noo-generative of ideology and society.

In effect, the notion of paradigm concerns the hard kernel, the double nucleus, by way of

its ultra-strong relations of attraction and repulsion among fundamental concepts, hence its Arch-

rule character, its nature as principle of principles, model of models, fundamentally

organizational, where social organization and noological organization are tightly knit into

Gordian knot generative of rules, models, prohibitions, skills, themselves generative of social

organization, or ideological organization…

Insert Figure 41
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 331

The notion of paradigm, in this nuclear sense, runs the risk of either being understood

idealistically or reduced to presume materialist force relations. The idealistic meaning would

make the paradigm into a command idea which would essentially direct all social organization;

the latter would in turn be a sort of product of powers of the mind. But that is precisely the point:

one had to be in the old paradigm (where the mind is considered as an isolated idea antithetical to

that of matter, and where it is necessary to opt between the idealist and the materialist view) in

order not to see that, at the level I wish to situate it, the notion of paradigm is non-idealistic and

still tenable. The paradigm is a pre-linguistic entity which founds language. Paradigmatic

relations that are translated into language, come from other sources. The studies by Dumezil and

Benveniste, for example, show that language (Indo-European) bears the stamp of noo-

sociocultural paradigm. It is not language that determines the tripartite Indo-European division;

in the beginning, it is an organizational socio-cultural phenomenon which, in its capacity as

relational totality, maintains language and is maintained by it. By the same token, the paradigm

is the pre-logical element upon which logic is founded. It is the foundation of, and expresses

itself in, axioms. It grounds the rules of inference and is expressed in them.

It does not resolve into a play of forces - between social classes, for example - because

this relationship is not uniquely a relation of forces; it is an informational/organizational relation,

and paradigms correspond in effect to information; but not information per se; rather, the

information-bearing vehicle, as opposed to the information-invested sign. The paradigm is

anterior, quasi-virtual. As, Levinas has stated, one has to have the “act which makes the form

suddenly appear, where it recognizes its model, up to that point never before glimpsed.” Whence

its subterranean character, buried away in the social unconscious and in the individual

unconscious. There has to be a grave crisis, a dislocation of systems, the transition to a reflective
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 332

meta-system in which one was situated before, in order that the paradigm finally become

available to conscious scrutiny…

I would almost say that the paradigm is related to the arkhe, but, in considering the triple

meaning of this term, “fundamental,” “primitive” and “ideal,” the paradigm really covers only

two senses: “fundamental” and “ideal”; it is lacking in that primitive aspect which blossoms in

the idea of archaism. Nevertheless, if Foucault, in order to treat the épistémè, had named this new

science “the archeology of knowledge,” he has done so quite suggestively.

The paradigm is a notion that dissolves as soon as one absolutely opposes the substantial

and the formal, the actual and the virtual. It is the forever virtual principle that is manifested in

the actual, but which, without this actualization, would be nothing; it is the not yet formalized,

not yet substantialized principle, but one which cannot be talked about except by starting with an

(ideal) formalization and a (social) substantialization. A master paradigm can then at the same

time dominate skill, culture and practice, and be continually renewed by them, without which it

would be nothing.

Let us recapitulate: it is in the out-of-sight nucleus, I mean to say that of strong internal

interactions between constituents (which, for us, can be put into words, translated into notions)

that the paradigm coheres, organizing organization, generating generativity, and getting

recursively regenerated by what it generates and organizes, in accordance with the below circuit:

Insert Figure 42

This is to say that the paradigm, both although and because we translate it into concepts,

is situated at the auto-geno-pheno level of organization, both of ideas and of culture, ergo of

society. As with any geno-pheno organization, the phenomenal process regenerates the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 333

generating process, is indispensable to it and is thus in this sense a part of it, as itself (the

generating process) is a part of phenomenal processes.

Consequently, in understanding the notion of paradigm in this way, we have not only a

nuclear notion, but also the notion of a hub, a nodal notion, or knot, between the heretofore

opposing, hostile immediacies of the empirical, the logical, the sociological: each nonetheless

essential to the construction of an epistemological meta-point of view.

The notion of paradigm had been buried away in the unconscious of the scientist, who,

thinking only to collect facts was unconscious of the fact that theories are needed to insert the

facts into, and that theories presuppose the existence of a non-empirical element in knowledge. It

had been buried away in the unconscious of the epistemological logician, who reduced to the

empirical that which, in the theory, was non-logical. Neither scientist nor logician took into

account the presence of this non-logical je ne sais quoi, or else they rejected it as a metaphysical

residue, whereas it was a matter of the theory's paradigmatic nucleus, what grounds its logic, its

discourse, what at the same time articulates it on a world view, an ideology, a culture, a social

practice.

The paradigm was, of course, invisible to disciplinary science, since the latter separated

the psychological, the cultural, the sociological, the logical, the epistemological, social structure,

cognitive structure, and so forth: all terms that are and must be connected and connectible, and

whose connection, thanks to the theory of auto-eco-re-organization, henceforward permits

recognition of the hitherto invisible, but master nucleus constituted by the paradigm.

For any knowledge of knowledge, any science of science, we can therefore appreciate the

necessity of knowing and recognizing paradigmatic reality, which in one fell swoop establishes
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 334

an epistemological knot of complexity, by establishing an ultra-strong relationship between

noological (linguistic, logical, ideological) and socio-cultural elements and instances.

Of course, we have only the inklings of paradigmatology. Maruyama on the one hand,

Foucault on the other (archeology of knowledge) are its initiators. It can readily be seen that the

notion of paradigm will not be amenable to clarification (relatively speaking, to be sure) until

what it clarifies is in a position to clarify it in turn, that is, until we have a better handle on

language, logic, noo-logic, the structure of culture and the cultural structuring of society.

We also need a science of the birth, decline and evolution of paradigms. On that score,

Kuhn is the pioneer. Foucault, for his part, has spotlighted the idea that the transition from one

paradigm to another is an “event” quasi-mutational in nature, which makes Foucault in effect the

Neo-Darwinian of paradigmatic archeology (Foucault, Les Mots et les choses [The Order of

Things]. pp. 229-30). But, just as biological evolution both integrates and overflows neo-

Darwinian schematisms in its complexity, so does evolution at the paradigmatic level (that of the

“basic blueprints of organization”) integrate and overflow any strictly event-like property. Thus

there are social processes (event-like themselves, of course) at bottom; what eats away at a

paradigm are the multiform and interrelated event-like (random and determined) processes, some

deriving from cognitive interactions with the environment (the uptake of a new item of

knowledge, the emergence of a new theoretical concept), others deriving from historico-social

processes themselves; as concerns, for example, the rise of Western science, the development of

capitalism, the middle class, the State, the nation; then, at the end of the 18th century, the split

with traditional homeostases: demographic, urban, machine development, itself linked to

technical development linked to scientific development); the unleashing of a brushfire,

exponential process, called upon to become progress, development. Thus paradigmatic evolution
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 335

- from paradigm to paradigm - informs as to the nature of the paradigm itself, for, if that

evolution depends on a historico-socio-cultural-noological-theoretical-scientific-empirical

confluence, then the nature of the paradigm lies in the multidimensionality that constitutes it as

connected to historical, social, cultural, noological, theoretical, scientific, empiric) realities...

Now, the necessity of a paradigmatology is both elicited and augmented by the fact that

we are trying, precisely because we wish to make the acquaintance of our own knowledge, to

change paradigms, the classical paradigm not permitting the entry into cognition of the notion of

paradigm, entry into cognition which alone can permit, not a paradigm shift (for such changes

did indeed occur without anyone's becoming aware of their paradigmatic nature), but a move to a

higher order paradigm, which supposes paradigm consciousness, i.e., permits embedding the

notion of paradigm within its paradigm.

Up until this time, the paradigm was the unknown of science, precisely because it gave

in-depth organization to science itself, as it is related both to empirical phenomenality and logic.

Whereas at present, it is knowledge of the paradigm that would permit access to a new type of

paradigm.

The breadth and radicalness of the paradigmatic reform should not be underestimated.

Neither should one underestimate its difficulty. For paradigmatic reform, it depends on favorable

socio-cultural conditions, which no consciousness could govern. But it also depends on a

revolution inherent to consciousness, which both depends on socio-cultural conditions and,

relatively speaking, frees itself from them, by contributing a paradigmatic innovation apt to

transform socio-cultural conditions, in accordance with the rotative dialectics which is that of all

social and intellectual life. At the level of intelligence, it is, at first glance, a matter of what is the

simplest, most elementary, most infantile thing in the world: changing the starting conditions of a
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 336

reasoning process; changing the associative and or repulsive relations between a few initial

concepts, on which depend the entire structure of the process, and all possible discursive

development from it. But that is exactly what is most difficult. For, contrary to appearances, the

difficulty is not to explain a difficult thing beginning with simple premises accepted by both

speaker and discussant; it is not to pursue a subtle reasoning along a pre-coded, pre-illuminated

path. The real difficulty is not to change levels of development, not even to change goals: it is to

change methods. The difficulty is to modify the apex concept: the massive and elemental idea

that holds up the entire intellectual edifice. For that bowls over transforms the whole structure of

the thought system, caves in the whole enormous superstructure of ideas in one stroke. That,

however, is what must be prepared for. That, however, is what must be undertaken. And this not

only on a strictly scientific plane, but also on a plane that concerns our view of and action on the

world, which concerns society in its being.

We can thus glimpse the enormous importance of a paradigmatic revolution. If the latter

is effected right at the heart of the scientific paradigm, it will concern, from interaction to

interaction, the life of the human being in its existential, interindividual social, political

dimension... The more the paradigm is foundational, the greater is its multidimensional reach, the

larger are the implications for the future of humanity. But the arrival of another Alexander the

Great will not suffice for cutting the paradigmatic Gordian knot. There will also have to be

conditions propitious to victory, the interactive (dialectical) togetherness which permits the

trenchant event that undoes...

But it is still too soon to approach this problem, which will come later. What is important,

essential here, at the epistemological stage where we find ourselves, is to show that the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 337

paradigmatic dimension does more than to just tack itself onto the empirical, logical, sociological

dimensions: it binds them together.

Translator’s Notes
1. Originally published as Morin, Edgar. “Social Paradigms of Scientific Knowledge.”

SubStance 39.2 (1983): 3-20 © 1983 by the Board of Regents of the University of

Wisconsin System. Reproduced courtesy of the University of Wisconsin Press.

2. Morin has in mind two methods of scientific theory-building, each of which informs the

other: method one (before Gödel) and method two (after Gödel). Both modes are invoked

post-experimentally. In the classical empiricist paradigm, research begins at the stage of

dispassionate observation and experimentation, wherein there is to be no communication,

and, optimally, no contact between the experimental observer (subject) and the observed

experiment (object), nor between the describer of the experiment (further subject) and the

description produced (further object), and so forth, so that the research is, at any given

moment, “subjectless” or “beheaded”. The stage of scientific explanation begins when an

attempt is made to account for the observed data. The theory thus constructed is

validated, first, on the base of congruence to reality, and second, on the basis of purely

formal considerations common to all theories. Prominent among this latter is the

necessity to conform (a) to the Law of Excluded Middle (if p is a proposition, then p or

not-p obtains) and (b) to the Law of Non-Contradiction (it is not the case that both p and

not-p obtain). A model that conforms to both (a) and (b) is said to be internally

consistent. In addition to internal consistency, classical formalization requires that system

of explanations be (c) finitistic or “complete”. That is, it must be possible, on the basis of

small number of axioms, to derive all possible theorems of the new system. Looked at

another way, if all initial conditions of an event are known (e.g., the mass, orbital
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 338

velocities, relative positions, etc., of two celestial bodies), then the outcome of an event

must be the inexorable inheritance from the givens (the two bodies SHALL collide).

Otherwise, the axioms must have been incomplete, or Nature must have discriminated,

for she, too, must be subjectless or impersonal.

a. Taken collectively, conditions (a)–(c) constitute the essence of pre-Gödelian

formalization. Morin´s “first phase”. For Morin, this “track” of validation is

typified by the thought of the Vienna Circle, with Karl Popper as the most

eminent proponent. For more on this mode of formalization, see La Méthod. Ch.

III, part I, “De l'lncertitude empirique à l'élaboration theorique” [“From Empirical

Uncertainty to Theoretical Elaboration”].

3. This summa of logical formalization comes, for Morin, with the advent of Gödel´s

theorem. The establishment of this theorem in some ways dealt a devastating blow to

axiomatics, and its implications are still far from being totally enumerated. Since some of

its: underlying concepts (principally, those of “undecidability” and “incompleteness) are

well on their way to becoming buzzwords and banners for enigma-mongers, it is

important to get the theorem straight. Absolutely speaking, the theorem neither proves

nor disproves anything. In particular, the theorem cannot be co-opted and exported to

literary criticism to be used all cold, wholesale proof that, among other things,

translations are necessarily indeterminate, the interpretation of a text is fatally

undecidable, systems of literary modeling are inherently incomplete, etc. There are

qualifications to be made in scope and in language. In naked form, Gödel´s theorem

shows that, if the axioms of arithmetic are consistent, then the formula “Arithmetic is

consistent” is formally undecidable i.e. neither the formula nor its contradictory is
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 339

demonstrable. But since this results in at least one formula that cannot be derived from

the axioms, it follows from the premise that the axioms are incomplete. The theorem is

then, “If arithmetic is consistent, then it is incomplete.” The theorem thus looks very

harmless but proves to be very embarrassing. Note that Gödel did not prove that

arithmetic was inconsistent. He proved that, if consistent, it is not possible to demonstrate

consistency within arithmetic itself. The embarrassment is manifold. First, it may be

possible to demonstrate the consistency of arithmetic with some other logical framework,

i.e., to “translate” the problem into another system. But then, that system would have to

be so complicated as to introduce doubt about its internal consistency. Second, nobody

knows what such a possible system could look like anyway. Third, that the system whose

consistency is undecidable happens to be arithmetic is very bad news, since logicians

(Russell-Whitehead, for example) had been in the habit of treating arithmetic as a partial

copy of logic. Hence, to implicate arithmetic is to implicate logic itself. Finally, by

analogy with the adage that “grammars leak” (all languages manage to have renegade

sentences that the base component cannot generate), it appears that all formal deductive

systems might also “leak”: that no finite set of axioms can generate all true formulae; no

absolute frame of reference or “géométral” (Leibniz- Serres) is likely to be found;

empirically known antecedent conditions will sometimes have unpredicted consequent

conditions; not all possible legal ways to “reason” have yet been named; new

formalizations (Riemannian geometry, for example) will be founded by changing old

axioms, even arbitrarily, and so forth and so on. Obviously, it is possible to be both

excited and depressed about these post-Gödelian developments, with many potential

reactions in between. Morin´s personal reaction to the Gödelian crisis in logic centers on
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 340

the non-absolutist and non-finitistic properties of the notion of incompleteness, and on its

translational properties. Morin concludes from the implied sterility and closure of

axiomatic systems that the experimenter must massively “compute” himself as a datum

(the system of explanation must be “auto-“): from the fact that any translation from one

system of representation to another will challenge the assumptions (consistency) of the

new system, he concludes that any translation made should be into the system with

greatest explanatory power or range of encompassment (i.e. the system should be “eco-“);

he concludes from the implied conceptual openness of Gödelian systems that the

formalization should be self-trascendent, and that the higher order system, or paradigm,

should always be the one which contains itself as an element of the system (i.e. the

system is “meta-“). For Morin this second or post-Gödelian phase of formalization is

represented by the Frankfurt school, whose thinking is embodied by, e.g., Adorno-

Horkheimer, and which stands in a relationship of both opposition and feedback to that of

the Vienna Circle. Readers interested in more about Gödel should consult Morin, chapter

III, part II, “La Logique de la théorie et la brèche gödélienne” [The Logic of Theory and

the Gödelian Gap”], subsection, “Le Complexe noologique: deux tribunaux” [“The

Noological Complex: Two Tribunals”]; cf. also infra, p. 14, and a first-rate exegesis by

Ernest Nagel and James R. Newman, Gödel´s Proof, New York University Press, 1958.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 341

Chapter 13: The Fourth Vision: On the Place of the

Observer
Translation by Pierre Saint-Amand

At first glance, the starlit sky strikes us by its disorder. We see a jumble of stars, scattered at

random. Yet, if we take a second look, an unshakeable cosmic order appears: each night,

apparently always and forevermore, there is the same starlit sky, each star in its place, each

planet accomplishing its infallible cycle. Yet if we take a third look, a new and formidable

disorder is injected into that order: we then see a universe in expansion, in dispersion, where the

stars are born, explode, and die. This third look forces us to conceive order and disorder together.

Thus, we need a kind of mental binocularity, for we see a universe that organizes itself while

simultaneously seeming to disintegrate.

In the case of life, we also encounter this problem of three visions. At first glance, it was

a matter of the supposed fixity of species reproducing themselves impeccably in a repetitive

fashion, for centuries and millennia, in an immutable order. And then, when we took a second

look, it seemed that there were evolutions and revolutions. How? By an eruption of randomness:

random mutations, accidents, geo-climatic and ecological disturbances. We also see that there

are enormous wastes, destructions and hecatombs, not only in biological evolution (most of the

species have disappeared), but in the interactions between ecosystems. So we find ourselves

obliged to take a third look, that is, to conceive order and disorder together so that we can

understand the organization and evolution of life.

Conversely, in the case of the theory of mankind, the first look did not reveal order, but

disorder. History was seen as a succession of wars, coups, assassinations, plots, and battles. It

was a Shakespearian history, marked by sound and fury. But a second look was taken, especially
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 342

in the last century, when infrastructural determinisms were discovered, laws of history were

found, and events became epiphenomenal. Hence, since that time, anthropological as well as

social sciences whose object is, however, extremely random, have tried to reduce randomness

and disorder by establishing—or, at least, believing to do so—economic, demographic, and

biological determinisms. Durkheim and Halbwachs go so far as to reduce suicide –the most

contingent and singular act, we might say– to its socio-cultural determinations.

Yet it is impossible in the field of knowledge of the natural world, as well as in that of the

historical or social world, to narrow our vision to encompass either disorder or order.

Historically, the conception of the Shakespearian idiot, which is that “life is a tale, told by an

idiot / Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” is not idiotic; it reveals an historical truth.

Rather, the vision of an intelligent history, that is, a history that obeys rational laws, IS idiotic. In

history, as well as in life, we have to take into account the wanderings, deviations, wastes, losses,

and destructions, not only of resources and life, but also of knowledge, know-how, talents and

wisdom.

We therefore find the same double problem everywhere: that of the necessary and

difficult combination/confrontation of order and disorder. Development of all the natural

sciences was achieved, since the middle of the last century, through the destruction of the old

determinism and by facing the difficult relationship between order and disorder. The natural

sciences are discovering and trying to integrate randomness (aléa) and disorder, although they

were deterministic at first and by postulation, whereas the human sciences, although they are

more complex by virtue of their objects, are lagging behind the times due to their conception of

scientificity, and are trying to expel disorder.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 343

The necessity of conceiving together the notions of order and disorder in their

complementarity, their concurrence, and their antagonism, poses exactly the same problem as

apprehending the complexity of physical, biological and human reality. Yet to do that, it is

necessary, in my view, to imagine a fourth vision, a new vision; that is, a vision that will focus

on our own vision as its object, as Heinz von Foerster once put it. We have to examine the way

we understand order, the way we understand disorder, and envisage ourselves looking at the

world, that is, including ourselves in our vision of the world.

I have to speak very briefly here about order; this is not a simple and monolithic concept.

For the notion of order surpasses –due to the richness and variety of its forms—the idea proposed

by old determinism. Indeed, old determinism understood order only as an anonymous,

impersonal, and supreme law ruling everything in the universe. By this very fact, that law

represented the truth of the universe.

There is in the notion of order not only the idea of determinism, the idea of law, but also

the idea of determination, that is, of definition and constraint, and in my view this notion of

constraint is more radical and fundamental than the idea of law. But we also find, in the idea of

order, eventually or diversely, notions of stability, constancy, regularity, repetition, and structure.

In other words, the concept of order considerably overlaps the old concept of law.

This means that order has become more complex. But how did it do so? First, there are

various types of order. Second, order is no longer anonymous and general, but is linked to

singularities. Even its universality is singular because our universe is now considered to be a

singular universe that had A singular birth and development, so that what we can call “order” is

the product of singular constraints unique to this universe.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 344

On the other hand, we know very well that what we call the living order (l'ordre vivant)

has to do with singular living creatures, and living species are thought to be able to produce and

reproduce singularities. Therefore, order and singularity are not antinomic. And this new order

breaks with the old conception that used to say: "There is only a science of the general." On the

other hand, order is henceforth linked with the idea of interaction. As a matter of fact, the great

laws of nature have become laws of interaction, that is, they can only operate if there are

interacting bodies. In other words, these laws depend on interactions that themselves depend

upon these laws.

More importantly, we see that, along with the notion of structure, the idea of order calls

for another idea, which is that of organization. In fact, the singular order of a system may be

conceived as the structure that organizes it; actually, the idea of system is the other side of the

idea of organization. I believe, therefore, that the idea of structure is halfway between the ideas

of order and organization. Now, organization cannot be reduced to order, although it contains

and produces order. An organization constitutes and maintains a unit or "whole", not reducible

to its parts because of its emerging qualities and its own constraints, because the emerging

qualities of the whole can retroact on the parts. For these reasons, organizations can establish

their own constancy.

This applies to active organizations, to machines, to self-organizations, and, finally, to

living creatures. They can establish their own regulation and produce their own movements.

Therefore, organizations produce order and at the same time are co-produced by principles of

order. This is true for any organized object in the universe: nuclei, atoms, heavenly bodies, and

stars. These are specific organizations that produce their constancy, their regularity, their
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 345

stability, their qualities, etc. As we see, the enriched idea of order does not dissolve the concept

of organization but forces us, on the contrary, to recognize it.

Finally, the enriched idea of order calls for a dialogue with the idea of disorder. This is

what in fact happened with the development of statistics and various methods of calculation that

take randomness into account. I shall return later to this point. What I would like to say now, to

conclude this brief catalogue of the various components of the notion of order, is that the

enriched idea of order –because it calls for the concepts of interaction and organization, because

it cannot expel disorder-- is a richer idea than the one proposed by determinism. Yet in enriching

itself the concept of order also relativized itself. Complexification and relativization go hand in

hand. There is no longer an absolute, unconditional, eternal order at the biological level –since

we know that the biological order was born three or four billion years ago on this planet and will

die sooner or later. Nor, however, is there an eternal order in the stellar, galactic and cosmic

universe.

Let us now consider the concept of disorder. In this case also, I will say that the modern

conception of disorder is much richer than that of randomness, although it always contains it. I

would even say that the idea of disorder is richer than the idea of order, because it necessarily

contains an objective pole and a subjective pole. What is disorder, as viewed from the objective

pole? Well, there are the agitations, dispersions and collisions that are associated with any heat

related phenomenon; there are also the irregularities, instabilities, and deviations that appear in a

process, disturb it, transform it; there are the shocks, random collisions, events, accidents; there

are the disorganizations, the disintegrations; there are, in informational language, noise and

errors. But, we should also think of the positive pole of the idea of disorder, which is that of
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 346

unpredictability or of relative indeterminacy. And one should not ignore this second aspect of the

problem of disorder.

What can we say, very rapidly now, about disorder? It is a macroconcept that

encompasses very different realities, but that always contains randomness. What we can also say

is that disorder has invaded the universe. Of course, disorder has not entirely replaced order in

the universe. Yet there is no longer a sector of the universe where there is no disorder. Disorder

is in energy (heat). Disorder is in the subatomic texture of the universe. Disorder is at the

accidental origin of our universe. Disorder is at the fiery heart of the stars. Disorder is

inseparable from the evolution of our universe. Omnipresent disorder not only opposes order to

create disorganization, but, strangely, also cooperates with it. As a matter of fact, random

meetings that suppose agitation, and thus, disorder, help to generate physical organizations

(nuclei, atoms, heavenly bodies), and actually generated the first living creatures. Disorder

cooperates with the generation of organizational order. Furthermore, disorder, present at the

origin of organizations, continually threatens physical organizations with disintegration. This

threat originates either from the outside (destructive accident), or from the inside (increase of

entropy). I shall add that self-organization, which characterizes living phenomena, contains in

itself a permanent process of disorganization which it transforms into a permanent process of

reorganization until, of course, final death.

The idea of disorder not only calls for that of organization, but very often calls for the

idea of an environment. We know that the classical way of exorcising randomness or disorder

was to define randomness as a meeting of independent deterministic series. Yet for that meeting

to happen, we must presuppose a milieu of random characteristics. This therefore constitutes a

fact of disorder for the affected deterministic series and can provoke disturbances and disarray in
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 347

them. And, more generally, when we consider the history of life, we can see that minimal

disturbances in the axis of rotation of the planet earth around the sun can provoke climatic

displacements, ice ages, or, on the contrary, floods and tropicalizations. All these climatic

transformations subsequently produce enormous transformations in the fauna and flora, and,

while provoking these massive eliminations, create new conditions for the emergence and

development of new species. In other words, a barely perceptible disorder at the planetary level

can be translated into absolutely massive effects that transform the environment, the conditions

of life, and affect all living creatures. For that matter, the idea of disorder not only cannot be

eliminated from the universe, but is necessary in order to conceive its nature and evolution.

I said that the idea of randomness always involves one of its polarizations: the human

observer/conceiver, in which it provokes uncertainty. And it is this introduction of the notion of

uncertainty that I find enriching. Why?

One cannot know if the uncertainty that gives rise to a new phenomenon that seems

random to us is due to the insufficiency of the resources or capacities of the human mind –an

insufficiency that prevents it from finding the hidden order behind the apparent disorder—or

whether this uncertainty is due to the objective character of reality itself. We don’t know if

randomness is an objective disorder or simply the product of our ignorance. This means that

randomness contains uncertainty about its own nature; that is, uncertainty on the nature of

uncertainty. Chaitin demonstrates that randomness can be defined as "algorithmic

incompressibility." Yet he also demonstrates that this cannot be proved: "To demonstrate that a

specific series of digits is dependent on randomness one must prove that there is not a smaller

programme able to calculate it. However, this needed proof cannot be found."
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 348

Thus, randomness opens up the uncertain issue of the human mind confronted at

simultaneously with reality and its own reality. Old determinism was an ontological assertion

about the nature of reality. Randomness introduces a relationship between observer and reality.

Old determinism excluded the organization, the environment, the observer. The enriched order,

as well as disorder, reintroduces them all by asking science to be less simplifying and less

metaphysical. For determinism was a metaphysical postulate, that is, a transcendent affirmation

on the reality of the world.

It’s not necessary to insist here on the poverty of a sole order, or a sole disorder. A

strictly deterministic universe that would be only order would be a universe without gradual

growth, without innovation, without creation. But a universe that would be only disorder would

not be able to constitute any organization at all, and therefore, would be incapable of conserving

newness and, consequently, evolution and development. An absolutely deterministic world, as

well as an absolutely random world, are two poor and mutilated worlds-- the first being

incapable of evolution, and the second even incapable of birth.

What is extraordinary is that the impoverished vision of the deterministic world managed

to dominate for two centuries as an absolute dogma, as the truth of nature. And why is this? It

dominated only because of the paradigmatic cleavage between subject and object that started in

the seventeenth century. It is because indetermination, contingency and freedom were topics left

for discussion in connection with subjectivity, the human mind and man –which themselves were

topics excluded from the discourse of science—that determinism dominated in an absolute

fashion on classical science. And determinism could only dominate in this absolute fashion

because of that cleavage within an experimentalist vision which extracts its objects from their

environment, and therefore excludes the environment. The moment WE isolate an object from
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 349

its environment WE also isolate its nature, the causes and the laws that govern it; the moment

WE isolate it from all external disturbances we create in vitro, purely deterministic, isolation.

Yet this pure determinism excludes the reality of the environment.

We could admit that universal determinism was a subjective need linked to a particular

moment in the development of science. Even today, many scientists dream of some hidden

parameters that would dissolve the apparent indetermination of uncertainty. Yet this very idea of

a hidden parameter recalls the hidden paraclete, the famous hidden God of our Western

metaphysics.

Finally, one should say that an absolutely deterministic world and an absolutely random

world together totally exclude the human mind that observes them, a mind that has to be placed

somewhere.

We should, therefore, mix these two worlds –although they exclude one another—if we

want to understand our world. Their incomprehensible mixture is the condition for achieving A

relative intelligibility of the universe. There is certainly a logical contradiction in the

order/disorder association. Yet it is less absurd than the vision of a universe that would be only

order, or that would be left to pure randomness. We could say that either order or disorder alone

are metaphysical, whereas together they are physical.

Therefore, we should learn to think OF order and disorder together. We know vitally how

to work with randomness. This is called strategy. We have learned statistically and in various

ways how to work with randomness. We should now go even further. Science is increasing its

commitment to a more and more profound dialogue with randomness. But for that dialogue to be

more fruitful, WE should know that order is relative and relational, and that disorder is uncertain.

We should also know that they can be the two faces of a same phenomenon: an explosion of stars
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 350

is physically determined and obeys physical and chemical laws but, at the same time, it IS an

accident, a deflagration, a disintegration, agitation, and dispersion; therefore, an expression of

disorder.

To establish a dialogue between order and disorder, we need something more than just these two

notions, and should associate them with others; hence, the idea of the following tetragram:

Insert Figure 43

What does this mean? It means that in order to conceive the universe we must start with a

dialogical relationship between these terms, each one echoing the others, each one needing the

others to enact itself, each one inseparable from the others, each one complementing the others

while being in opposition to them. And this tetragram is necessary to understand morphogeneses,

for it is in turbulences and in the diaspora that particles, nuclei, and heavenly bodies are put

together; it is in the furious forge of stars that atoms are constituted; and the origin of life is all

eddies, vortices, and flashes of lightning. And it is these morphogeneses, these transformations,

complexifications, developments, degradations, destructions and decadences that this tetragram

enables us to conceive. But this tetragram is not at all the sacred cipher; it is not the biblical

J.H.V.H. , it does not give us the key to the universe, it does not command, it is only a

paradigmatic formula that enables us to understand the play of formations and transformations

and permits us to remember the complexity of the universe. This formula, far from being the key

to the universe, allows us to converse with the mystery of the universe, for today order has

ceased to illuminate all things. It has become a problem. Order is as mysterious as disorder.

The same applies to life. We used to be stupefied by death. Today we know that death

corresponds to the norm of physical interactions. What is physically amazing is that living

organization and living order exist at all.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 351

I pass over the necessity of establishing a dialogical relationship between organization

and environment, object and subject. I come to the major part of my pre-conclusion: we have to

recognize that the real field of knowledge is not the pure object, but the object viewed,

perceived, and co-produced by us. The object of knowledge is not the world, but the community

Us/World, since this world is part of our vision of the world, which is itself part of the world.

In other words, the object of knowledge is phenomenology and not ontological reality.

This phenomenology is our reality AS beings in the world. Observations made by human minds

contain the indestructible presence of order, disorder, and organization in microphysical,

macrophysical, astrophysical, biological, ecological, and anthropological phenomena. Our real

world is a universe in which the observer will never be able to eliminate disorder, and from

which he shall never be able to eliminate him/herself.

I will set forth my conclusion rapidly. It contains three points. The first is that we should

reverse the conception of scientific knowledge that became dominate after Newton; namely, the

notion that certainty was the sole goal of science. Today the dialogic presence of order and

disorder shows us that knowledge ought to try to negotiate with uncertainty. This also means that

the purpose of knowledge is not to discover the secret of the world or the master equation, but is

to establish a dialogue with the world. Thus, a first message: "Work with uncertainty."Working

with uncertainty bothers some minds, but it brings out the best in others. It incites us to think

adventurously and to control our thought. It incites us to criticize the established knowledge that

tries to masquerade as certainty. It incites us to self-examination and self-criticism.

Secondly, contrary to appearances, to work with uncertainty is a prod towards rationality.

A universe that was only order was not a rational universe, but a rationalized one. By this I mean

that the universe was supposed to obey the logical models of our mind. And in that sense, it was
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 352

a totally idealist universe. Yet the universe cannot be entirely rationalized. And what is

rationality? It is the opposite of rationalization, although it comes from the same source. It is the

dialogue with the irrational or, perhaps, with that which can have no rationale.

My third point is that working with uncertainty incites us to complex thinking. The

paradigmatic incompressibility of my tetragram (order/disorder/interaction/organization) shows

that there will never be a master word, a master formula, that will command the universe. And

complexity is not only a matter of thinking both unity and multiplicity together: it is also a matter

of thinking uncertainty and certainty, the logical and the contradictory, together, and this implies

the inclusion of the observer in the observation.

In the final analysis, all this impinges upon the political domain. Certainly there is no

direct lesson to be drawn from these physical and biological notions of order and disorder in the

social, human, historical and political domain. Why? Because at the anthropological or social

level, disorder can mean liberty or crime, and thus the word disorder is inadequate for the

discussion of human phenomena on this scale. The word order can itself signify constraint or, on

the contrary, self-regulation. Yet, even if there is no direct conclusion to be drawn from what I

have just said about disorder and order in society, there is, however, an indirect invitation to

break with the myth or the ideology of order. The mythology of order cannot only be found in

the reactionary idea that all innovation and novelty signify degradation, danger, and death. This

myth also inspires the utopia of a transparent society without conflicts and without disorder.

Discussion
Elisabeth Paté [Department of Industrial Engineering, Stanford University]: I would like to

return to the question of order and disorder. Are these intrinsic phenomena, or do they reflect the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 353

limits of comprehension and knowledge? If I understand you correctly, you posed this question,

and said that you don't know the answer. You also conclude that, in fact, it doesn't matter.

Morin. Ah, no! Then I would like to hear your conclusion and, in particular, how this defines the

object of human research and the quest for knowledge. In other words, are you trying to beat a

phenomenon that is unbeatable, or are you only trying to go deeper into an understanding of

things?

I think the problem you are posing is somewhat analogous to the problem of the limits of

knowledge. A first way of considering it is to consider the limit of knowledge as an impassable

wall which obliges us to renounce and despair. There is, however, a second way, where

awareness of a limit of knowledge becomes, of itself, an intrinsic progress that permits further

advancement. That is what Niels Bohr expressed very well when he talked about quantum

physics: the collapse of the old determinism was not a terrible regression as the classical

physicists of the time believed; it became the opening of a new dialogue with reality. What is not

interesting is pure order or pure randomness, that are very poor metaphysical deities. But what is

interesting is the mystery of a complex reality that we can question by combining the notions of

order, disorder, and organization. Until further notice, the world of phenomena is far richer than

that of essences. As the poet said: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio / Than are

dreamt of in your philosophy."

Paul Watzlawick. I would like to know if this new current called "constructivism" has a place in

your presentation, that is, the study of methods and phenomena that we discover the moment we

start to explore the consequences of taking a certain point of departure. Is it not true that this

position already contains, to a certain degree, the results of what the researcher might discover,
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 354

and at the same time, what Heinz von Foerster has said, and continually reminded us, which is

that we construct reality?

Morin. Yes. I thank you. I agree completely. I must only add: We construct the reality that

constructs us.

Note
Originally published as Morin, E. (1984). The fourth vision: on the place of the observer. Paper

presented at the Proceedings of the Stanford International Symposium, September 14-16, 1981.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 355

Chapter 14: Self and Autos

Introduction
Life presents a double countenance: on the one hand, in the form of living beings who appear

and disappear discontinuously, on the other, in the form of the continuous process of

reproduction, which is the temporal propagation of a pattern. "Macroscopically," life presents

itself in a manner as paradoxical and "complementary" as physical reality presents itself

microscopically, appearing sometimes to be undulatory, sometimes corpuscular in nature.

Classical biology has tried to cover up this paradox. During an initial stage, reality was

accorded to the notion of species, even though individuals alone are real and the notion of

species merely ideal. Individuals comprising the species appeared only as samples or specimens

and the organism was taken to be the concrete object that permits the study of the species

through its individuals. Nevertheless, the duality has continued to reappear with the birth and

development of genetics: on the one hand, the germen, on the other, the soma; on one side, the

genotype; on the other, the phenotype. From a genetic standpoint, the phenotype is merely the

genotype after modification by environmental conditions. The term "phenomenal" (the living

individual, his/her behavior) is subordinate to the term "generative," which appears as an

anonymous program –produced, so it would seem, by the most anonymous of cosmic actors:

chance. Such a simplified and reduced view tends to dodge the disturbing problem of the

autonomy of living beings. Those who view the question from this angle never use the prefix

"auto."

Nonetheless, the prefix ''auto'' could have been used in connection with the study of

living beings. Instead, the latter were either reduced to the state of organisms, that is to say

organization without intelligence, functioning as if by automatic regulation (homeostasis), or else

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 356

they were considered experimentally, isolated from the concrete conditions of their

communicational and/or social life. For decades, they were perceived according to a behaviorist

outlook, in which the source of an organism's responses was found, not in an autonomous

computation but in an exterior stimulus. Only since the development of ethology in the second

half of the 20th century have we learned to conceive of these "organisms" as living beings that

communicate among themselves and that possess cognitive aptitudes and intelligence. Still, the

autonomy of these beings has not been considered from the viewpoint of its organizational

foundations.

The double-countenance conception of life –generative (genetic, genotypical) and

phenomenal (individual, phenotypical)—as auto-organization is a conspicuous necessity that

theoretical work has often attempted to hide in order to construct a simplified conception of life.

This attitude is true to the classical conception, according to which determinism is always

exterior to objects and therefore to beings as well. The advent of cybernetics was necessary to

conceive the idea of an endocausality (Morin 1977), which interacts with exterior causalities

(exocausalities) to give rise to and maintain the autonomy of a system. The conception of this

endocausality is linked not only with the idea of retroaction, and thus with a retroactive effect

allowing it to become causal, but also with the idea of regulation, and thus with an internal cause

of constancy in a system. The advent of the informational idea of "program" was necessary if we

were to conceive of an endocausality determining finalities suited to a system. This is, however,

not at all sufficient, since the pattern applied to the living organization remains an artificial

machine (artifact), which always receives its program, its materials, its conceptions, and its

fabrication from an exterior source, that is, from humans. It is nevertheless the impetus of

cybernetics and the theory of automata that bring to the fore the prefix "auto."
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 357

The work of von Neumann (1966) on the theory of self-reproducing automata was

instrumental in emphasizing the idea and theoretical problem of self-reproduction. Further,

Neumann, in reflecting on the difference between artificial automatons (artifacts) and natural

automatons (living beings), paved the way for the idea of auto-organization. If artificial

automatons begin to wear out as soon as they start functioning (though made up of very reliable

components), while living beings (though made up of unreliable components) hold out against

wear for a certain time, it is because the former have no means of regenerating their components

and are incapable of reorganizing themselves, while living beings do possess the ability to

regenerate their components because they are in a permanent state of auto-reorganization.

The idea of permanent auto-reorganization as presented by Atlan (1972) is central in

clearing the way for the idea of auto organization and the idea of autopoiesis. Toward the end of

the 1950s researchers began trying to conceive the organization of life in terms of auto-

organizing systems (von Foerster 1960) and autopoiesis (Maturana and Varela 1972), but the

question already comes up. What does "auto" mean? It becomes clear that no concept exists that

epitomizes the mysterious ability of a being, a system, a living machine, to draw from within

itself the source of its particular autonomy of organization and behavior while (in order to fulfill

this task) relying on energizing, organizational, and informational nourishment extracted or

received from the environment. What, then, is a living autonomy, autonomous only because, at a

different level, it is ecodependent? To fill this conceptual vacuum I propose the provisional

concept of autos in order to enable us to consider the problems posed by the prefix "auto."

Varela (1975, 1978) gives the name "self-reference" to the characteristic trait of

autopoiesis and proposes formally to define self-reference as reentry and therefore recursivity. I

believe that self-reference, reentry, and recursivity are indeed key notions in the understanding of
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 358

the living phenomenon. However, as necessary as they are, they alone are not enough because

they are too broad in scope: They can account for a great number of physical, self-organizing

phenomena that are in no way biological, such as the organization of the atom, of stars, or even

of whirlwinds.

I therefore propose to distinguish the notion of self from that of autos. A whirlwind is

self-organizing in the very movement by which it establishes its form as a constant circuit; this

form is recursive in the sense that final state and initial state are indistinguishable. The birth of

the stars, as well as of our sun, is the result of the encounter of implosive (gravitational) and

explosive (heat) retroactions, which together close the loop of regulated self-organization. The

phenomenon of the self –that is, of being and existence—is a fundamental physical phenomenon

since it is around the self that our organized world is formed, made up of atoms and stars –we

can even consider, as does Bogdanski (1978), that waves are self-regulating phenomena. On

another occasion I have developed the theory of self-production (Morin 1977). That is why I

consider the autos to be a richer concept than the self, which it contains and incorporates at the

same time [in fact, biological auto-organization contains and controls self-organization, which is

brought about thermodynamically in and by "dissipative structures" (Nicolis and Prigogine

1976)].

This kind of distinction between autos and self is conventional with respect to the current

meaning of these terms: we could call autos what I call self and call self what I call autos.

However, if it is admitted that the autos corresponds to the phenomenon of the self with regard to

biological complexity, then the autos possesses what is also shared by auto organization,

autopoiesis, auto-regulation, and auto-reference, and lays the foundations of the type of

autonomy peculiar to the living being.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 359

Auto- (Geno-Pheno-) Organization

First of all, let us be careful to avoid any definition of the autos that would mask one of life's two

countenances, either the generative (which is crystallized in the notion of species) or the

phenomenal (which is crystallized in the notion of the individual). Generally speaking, genetic

theories tend to subordinate the phenomenal to the generative, while theories of auto

organization tend to subordinate the idea of auto-reproduction to the idea of auto-production

(Maturana and Varela, 1974). What is needed is a complex conception capable of revealing the

unity in this duality and the duality in this unity.

It is necessary to speak of uniduality within auto-organization. Because of its recursive

nature, this double organization is in fact one. As has often been observed, "the cell is at the

same time producer and product which incorporates the producer" (Varela 1975); in other words,

auto organization is an organization that organizes the organization necessary for its own

organization. Generative organization (which biology reduces, reifies, and unidimensionalizes in

the idea of genes carrying an organizing "program") and phenomenal organization (which

biology considers as metabolism and homeostasis) can neither be considered as two distinctive

organizations nor reduced to an indistinct recursive entity. Distinction and indistinction are both

present. Distinction appears as the necessary translation of the language, made up of four signs,

of the genetic code, and into the 20- "lettered" language of amino acids. A heterogeneity appears

between even the concept of species and the concept of individual, which seem to belong to

different worlds. Indistinction exists in the fact that all of these terms are joined in recursive

loops where the conjugation of generative and phenomenal constitutes auto organization.

Therefore, generative and phenomenal should be viewed as two poles. On one side, the

generative pole, representing permanent regeneration and reorganization and periodical

reproduction. On the other, the phenomenal pole, the pole of praxis of living beings, of the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 360

organization of their interactions and behavior in a hic et nunc environment. At one pole we

have, reproduction–that is the temporal survival of the "species". At the other we find

metabolism–what’s happening now, eating, action—that is the act of living.

Geneticists think that we live to survive, in other words, in order to reproduce. Jacob tells

us that "the dream of a bacterium is to make another bacterium." Common sense seems to tell us

that we eat to live; we don't live to eat. But in fact, we survive also in order to live, that is, to

metabolize, that is, to "enjoy" life, and we also live to eat. Means and end are not disconnected,

but belong to the living circuit where all is end and means at the same time:

Insert figure 44

Any theory of the autos must then contain a theory of auto-(geno-pheno) organization.

Any development of the autos must allow for the development and the complexification of the

uniduality of the genos and of the phenon. Thus in the tremendous development of phenomenal

individuality characteristic of vertebrates, we see two "epigenetic" apparatuses taking form, at

once dissociated and communicating, one devoted to reproduction (sexual apparatus), the other

devoted to the organization of phenomenal existence (neurocerebral apparatus).

Communicational-Computational Auto-organization
Any theory of the autos must also necessarily allow for the idea of communicational-

informational organization, and by the same token, the idea of computation. That much would

seem clear since the principal aim of the "biological revolution" initiated by Watson and Crick is

to apply a cybernetic-informational plan to the organization of the cellular being, and to conceive

this organization as a communicational pattern (DNA-RNA-proteins). Nevertheless, this

cybernetic theory and biological conception lack the idea of apparatus. DNA is seen at the same

time as memory and as the pure program of a "machine," which is the cell. However, if we look
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 361

closely we see that the prokaryote cell is almost indistinctly both a machine and a computing

apparatus. Indeed, the bacterium computes internal and external data and makes its "decisions"

according to the outcome of its treatment of the data. Here again we see the difference between

self-organization, which is only physical (stars, whirlwinds, atoms), and auto organization, which

while remaining physical becomes biological. Genophenomenal duality is known to self-

organizations, and they possess no communicational-informational organization endowed with a

computing apparatus. They form and maintain themselves "spontaneously," whereas in the

genophenomenal auto organization, "prigoginian" spontaneity is set off, controlled, and

supervised by the computational-informational-communicational organization.

Here it should be strongly emphasized that no living process, neither the process of

metabolic organization nor the process of the organization of reproduction, is conceivable

without the action of at least one computing apparatus (and in the case of ontogenesis of a

polycellular being, without the interactions of the computing apparatuses of the cells that

multiply by mitosis). It should be said that the idea of computation is essential in allowing us to

gain an understanding of the logically original nature of the autos.

To conceive of this nature, a double deficiency must be overcome: first, the deficiency of

classical biological theory and, second, the deficiency of the theory of self-reference. Classical

biological theory, whose influence continues to dwell in the unconscious of biologists, tends to

minimize individuality to the benefit not only of genericity, but also of generality. The axiom

"any real science is a science of the general" tends to mask the remarkable characteristics of the

living individuality: the existence of singular beings, each with its empirical difference, each

unique unto itself, and each computing its own existence in terms of itself and the being for self

(pour-soi).
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 362

Being for Self and Auto-centrism

Here the idea of auto-reference demonstrates its usefulness. The definitions of auto-reference

hitherto put forward (Varela 1975) have the great merit of being formalizing definitions, but are

nonetheless insufficient. Auto-reference should be conceived of as an aspect of the

multidimensional reality –at once logical, organizational, and existential –of the autos. In order

to understand auto-reference, the computational organization of the living being must be

considered. All living beings, even the least complex, are individuals endowed with a

computational apparatus. This apparatus is radically different from the artificial "computers,"

which are constructed by others, receive their program from others, and function for others. On

the other hand there is in the unicellular being computation of the self, by the self, and for the

self. Such a computation is not merely auto-referring, even though it is fundamentally

"egocentric." In the same way that an auto-organizing system is at the same time necessarily an

auto-ecoorganizing system, since it needs the environment for its own autopoiesis, an auto-

referring computation is necessarily eco-referring; that is, it must be capable of examining,

processing, and transforming into information the data or events that come to it from the

environment. What is most important, though, is that the data be processed as "objects" by the

computation, precisely because the computing being establishes itself as subject, insofar as it

computes, decides, and acts of itself and for itself. What is essential then, is the distinct

ontological affirmation, unique and privileged, of the self and for the self that characterizes all

living beings.

This sort of ontological affirmation necessitates the defense of the identity (autos = the

same), which necessarily supposes the distinction between self and non-self, and as a result the

rejection of the non-self into the exterior (immunology). As Varela rightly states, immunology is

a property of the total system and not merely a quality particular to certain defense agents. The
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 363

ontological affirmation of the self and for the self is expressed by the "egotistical" computation

that determines actions finalized by and for the self. It is therefore not simply a question of an

objective behavior, but also of ethos - that is, the behavior performed by, a subject for itself (that

is why there is progress when behavior science becomes ethology). The egotistical being for self

(pour-soi) is not necessarily limited to the individual. Auto reference includes, in a manner

sometimes concurrent and antagonistic, as part of its principle of identity, not only the

individual, but also the process of reproduction it carries with it. And the circle of the autos can

expand to include progeniture, family, and society.

However, even in those cases where it acts for "its own" (family, for example), the living

being, from the bacterium to Homo sapiens, obeys a particular logic according to which the

individual, though ephemeral, singular, and marginal, considers itself the center of the world. All

others are excluded from the individual's ontological site, including homozygous twins,

congeners, and fellow men. According to a principle of exclusion that brings to mind Pauli's

principle, this egocentricity, that excludes from its own site all other beings, this computation

and ethos/for the self furnish the logical, organizational, and existential definition of the concept

of subject. Being for self, auto-reference, and auto-egocentrism are so many traits that allow us

to formulate and recognize the notion of subject. The opposition self/non-self is not only

cognitive, it is ontological. It creates a duality between the valorized realm of the self-subject,

centered and finalized, and the exterior universe of objects, which may be dangerous or useful.

The duality subject-object is born of this same dissociation. Thus, theoretical efforts, which

began with the idea of auto-reference should, if they are to be consistent, continue through the

idea of auto-Eco reference to arrive at the concept of subject, within which are linked the notions

of being for self, auto-centrism, autologic, ethos, and egotistical computation.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 364

We have become too accustomed to reducing the notion of subject and subjectivity to

contingency, affectivity, and sentimentality. In fact, we should think of the notion of subject in

terms of a fundamental logical and organizational category that characterizes the living

individuality and is inseparable from auto-genophenoorganization.

Individual subjectivity, although it considers itself to be the center of the universe, is

ephemeral, peripheral and local. Yet it is precisely this center "point" that brings together the

organizing processes and permits the characteristics of life to emerge. In this perspective, it is

possible for the point to be richer than the processes that intervene in it, since it is the focal point

of the emergences. Individuals (subjects) are the beings that emerge in phenomenal reality. It is

in the individual (subject) that all processes of reproduction take place. Thus the concept of

subject is not to be considered as an epiphenomenon; it should rather be ontologically registered

in our notion of "life."

I shall even attempt to show that the concept of reproduction and the concept of subject

share a fundamental common ground. Let us consider the individual (subject) from the

standpoint of its egotistical computation: it recognizes the self from the non-self and organizes its

own molecular transformation and regeneration not only in detail, but also globally, as a whole.

Considering this, we could say that the power of auto-computation, both in detail and in its

globality, is at the same time a power of auto-reflection. All confusion should be avoided with

what we call reflective conscience, or conscience of the conscience, which, precisely, supposes a

conscience. The computing subject recognizes, knows, computes, decides, but is not "conscious"

of itself. Even the human subject is in the unconscious (Lacan 1977). In what terms, then, should

we speak of auto-reflection, that is, the ability to split the being in two, to consider oneself
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 365

subject and object at the same time as in the trite sentence of Piccardo, which nonetheless

illustrates the ego structure very well, from a human language standpoint: "I am me," that is:

Insert Figure 45

This idea of auto-reflection would remain gratuitous if it weren't for the existence of

auto-reproduction. What is cellular auto-reproduction? It is a process by which, starting with a

chromosomal schism, the cell divides itself in two, each half reconstructing of itself its absent

half, a process that leads to the formation of two cellular beings. This means that in the very

structure of the being (subject) there is a potential duality that leads it to split in two and to

multiply by two. This capacity for duplication, which we do not find in the cerebral apparatus

(except in the ability to recall representations and images), does exist in the generative memory

as the capacity to split the self, practically, physically, organizationally, and biologically. If the

ego is capable of creating an ego-alter, that is to say, a different self, it is also capable of

conceiving itself as an alterego, that is, a self that is different ("I am the other," wrote the poet

Rimbaud).

Let us consider the two egos-alter resulting from mitosis. They are genetically identical

and almost identical phenomenally. Nevertheless each one excludes the other from its subjective

site, and henceforth each computes and acts for itself. The possibility of communication does

exist, however, through identification between the two congeners, whence the possibility of

inclusion in associations that may take the form of organisms or, for polycellular individuals, of

a society. So each living being carries within it simultaneously a principle of exclusion of others

from its subjective site as well as a principle of inclusion of the congener in the broadened

circuit of its subjective autos. The possibility of communication between congeners does not

consist solely of an exchange of signs according to a common code, but is also the possibility of
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 366

intersubjective communication, which, with developments of the living organization, can take

the form of a communion or a coorganization. Whence the possibility, through trans-subjective

interactions (between individual subjects) of the formation of macro-individual subjects of the

second order (polycellular beings) or of the third order (societies). Thus it can be seen that the

concept of subject, far from being epiphenomenal, may be considered as a hinge between genetic

processes of reproduction and phenomenal processes of communicational organization between

cells (organisms) and polycellular individuals (societies).

This leads us to an unexpected mental revolution. Classical scientific method forced us to

turn away from the notion of subject, including from ourselves, observers-conceivers. Here we

not only consider the notion of subject, but also expand it and acknowledge it as something that

belongs to all living creatures. Both the genetic code and subjectivity are common to all

creatures, from the bacterium to the elephant.

With regard to the preceding, we see that autopoiesis and auto-organization are key

notions, but only on condition that they be enveloped and developed in a theory of the autos. The

autos sums up the conditions of existence and the reproduction of life, and takes the form of the

principle of auto-genophenoorganization (which is itself included in an incompressible paradigm

of auto-genophenoecoreorganization). As for the living being, it takes on the characteristics of

the individual subject. The notions of autos and subject, which recursively refer to one other,

lead to a logical and ontological mutation. This is a decisive break with conceptions that look for

an explanation in one key term or in one guiding principle, such as the DNA program or

behavior.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 367

Note
Originally published as Morin, E. (1981). Self and autos. Autopoiesis: A theory of Living

Organization.Zeleny, Milan. Ed. North Holland, New York. Amsterdam: Springer.

References
Adler, J., and Wung-Wai Tso (1974). "Decision" making in bacteria: Chemotactic response of

Escherichia coli to conflicting stimuli. Sciences 184, 1292-1294.

Atlan, H. (1972). Du bruit comme principe d'auto-organisation. Communications 18, 21-35.

Bogdanski, C. (1978). L'etre vivant dans ses aspects dimensionnels et temporels. Bull. Bioi. Fr.

Belg.

Foerster, H. von (1960). On self-organizing systems, and their environments. In M. C. Yovits

and S. Cameron (Eds.), Self-organizing systems (pp. 31-50). New York: Pergamon.

Gunther, G. (1962). Cybernetic ontology and transjunctional operations, In M. C. Yovits, Jacobi

and Goldstein (Eds.), Self-organizing systems (pp. 313-392). Washington, D.C.: Spartan

Books.

Lacan, J. (1978). Le seminaire II. Paris: Seuil.

Morin. E. (1977). La methode, I. La nature de la nature. Paris: Seuil.

Morin. E. (1980). La methode. II. La vie de la vie. Paris: Seuil.

Neumann, J. von (1966). Theory of self-reproducing automata. A. W. Burkes (Ed.), Urbana:

University of Illinois Press.

Nicolis, G., and Prigogine, I. (1976). Self-organization in non-equilibrium systems. New York:

John Wiley.

Piccardo, O. G. V. (unpublished). Egostructures.

Varela, F. (1975). A calculus for self-reference, Int. J. Gen. Systems 2, 5-24.

Varela, F., Maturana, H., and Uribe, R. (1974). Autopoiesis: The organization of living systems,
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its characterization and a model, Biosystems, 5, 187-196.

Vaz, N. M., and Varela, F. (1978). Self and non-sense, an organism centered approach to

immunology (to appear in Medical Hypothesis).

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 369

Chapter 15: Can We Conceive of a Science of

Autonomy?1 and 2
It would appear that the classical vision of society and humanity which only recognizes

determinisms and determinations is obsolete. The traditional ideas of autonomy, responsibility,

and liberty which derive from our 'subjective' or existential experience must be modified. A new

'science of autonomy', with origins in biology and shaped by Cybernetics and System Theory,

must be developed.

I will start by a thesis coming from a paradox that both the sociologist and the political or

social agent encounter. The paradox is that, if we apply the ´classical´ scientific view of society,

we only perceive determinisms. Autonomy for individuals and groups is excluded as well as

individuality, finality, and even the subject itself.

This, state of affairs creates a schizophrenic situation for the sociologist or the political

agent alike. On the one hand, his subjective experience, like that of all other human beings, stems

- so he likes to believe - from his relative freedom, his responsibility, his duties, his intentions; he

sees around him, not only determinisms but also actors with whom he enters in relation of

competition, conflict, or cooperation. However, there is a complete disparity between this

'experiential' subjective worldview and the so-called scientific one. A schizophrenic solution

emerges at two different levels of thought, which never communicate between each other. As an

example, the technocrat sees determinisms, mechanism, and processes in society but, once in a

while, he takes a philosophical leap and sees society as made up of citizens and subjects who

have problems or needs. The Marxist also lives in this schizophrenic situation: on the one hand,

he conceives the science of history as subjected to deterministic processes, but, on the other
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 370

hand, as exemplified by Lenin, he attributes a paramount role to decision making and to strategic

choice, he extols the will, the conscience, he expresses criticisms and denunciations, in other

words, he places himself on the moral plane.

Can we or should we accept this dilemma? Indeed, I postulate herein, that there is a way

to resolve it.

In reality, what is happening in the domain of the social sciences? There exist two

sociologies in one. There is the sociology which wants to be scientific and the one which resists

this scientification. The former has adopted the physical deterministic model alluded to earlier. It

uses mechanistic and energy-related notions from which the idea of agents and subjects is

eliminated. The other sociology refers to actors, subjects, of conscious-raising, of ethical

problems but, by so doing, is labeled absolutely non-scientific. This second sociology is

denounced and cursed by the 'scientists' to be literary, journalistic. It is in effect devoid of any

scientific foundation.

Furthermore, the so-called scientific sociology is oblivious to biology, not because it

wanted to defend the specificity of the human phenomenon, but to avoid the complexity of the

bio-anthropo- logical-social reality. This void creates a loss. The anthropological-social

phenomena are reduced to structural thought processes modeled after the physical classical

model which is much simpler than the contemporary biological model. As a result, sociology

becomes a science devoid of life.

It shuns life, the Lebenswelt, the biocultural human reality. It even shuns the very notion

of man which is exorcised, as if it were deprived of all content and significance. On the other

hand, thought processes must be given fundamental primacy, in order to comprehend the

complexity of the anthroposocial reality.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 371

We need a methodology which can recognize and communicate distinctions without

disaggregating or disassociating. We need a methodology which respects the multidimensional

character of the anthropo-social reality, i.e., its biological, social, and individualistic dimensions.

This methodology must be able to handle, at the same time, the problem of the individual and

that of autonomy.

In what follows, I would like to show that it is possible to consider autonomy, the individual, the

subject not as metaphysical notions, but rather, as notions which have physical, biological, and

sociological roots. It is the modern development of the natural sciences which allows, today, to

give a scientific meaning to the idea of autonomy and, in so doing, allow a real revolution in

thinking.

The first sign of this revolution manifests itself in the appearance of a science of

organization. In my views, the greatest merit of Norbert Wiener's Cybernetics and of von

Bertalanffy's System Theory is to have contributed fundamental elements to conceive the

organization. Of course, the idea of system is not new. It has been used for a long time to

characterize the organized assembly and interactions between the sun and its planets. The idea of

organization was central, until the 18th Century, to the biological paradigm which distinguished

the organic from the inorganic and that, in the 19th Century, considered the body as an organism.

However, what is new is the cybernetic and systematic focus of the problem of organization qua

organization. Cybernetics contributes the important concept of feedback. The latter is a

conceptual breakthrough because it shatters linear causality and makes us conceive the paradox

of a causal system, whose effect modifies the cause - a form of circular causality.

It is circular causality, for instance, that exists in a central heating system where the effect

caused by the furnace, (i.e., the increase in room temperature) determines, via the thermostat,
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 372

when the furnace will stop. In such a system, the heated room is thermally autonomous from the

external variations of temperature due to the regulating feedback.

This regulating phenomenon of thermal autonomy based on feedback, is similar to that which

exists, in more complex form, in homeothermal animals.

Hemeothermia is one of the homeostatic properties which produces and maintains the

constant composition and organization of the physical and chemical constituents of our

organisms. Therefore, feedback allows us to conceive the existence of an internal causality or

endocausality, which, in a way, frees the organism from external causalities while, at the same

time, bearing its effects, reacting, countering, and even nullifying them. Homeothermia is not

within reach or liable to degradation from the external cold temperature but responds by an

increased production of internal heat, and, paradoxically, the (external) cold provokes the

(internal) heat.

We arrive at the fundamental principle that a system with feedback creates its own

causality and hence its own autonomy; just as Claude Bernard stated with such brilliance in the

last century: "The regulation of the interior environment is the condition for autonomy".

The second sign of the revolution in thinking, to which we alluded above, stems from the

notion of system. With it, we are led to the idea that an organized assembly, including its

subsystems, display properties, which did not exist in the parts when separated from the whole.

These are emergent properties. What is interesting is that, once produced, these properties affect,

through feedback, the conditions that led to their formation. Among these properties, some are

properties of autonomy. As an example, let us take the example of the first living cell which

could only be born from chance interactions among nucleic and amino acids in a 'witch's brew'.

The birth of this cell depends on extremely fortuitous circumstances. However, as soon as it
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 373

existed as a living entity, the protocell took advantage of properties unknown to its chemical

micromolecular components. In particular, it used the capacity to metabolize and to exchange

with its environment, as well as the more fundamental properties of autoproduction and of

autoreproduction.

It is evident that, as soon as the property of autoreproduction exists, reproduction no

longer depends on external random conditions upon which the origin of life depends. Living

organisms can multiply under conditions which depend not only on their environment but upon

their own organization. Starting from an original protocell, life probably took about a decade to

spread all over the world.

Therefore, the systemic notion of emergence and the cybernetic notion of feedback allow

us to conceive organization and, at the same time, the autonomy of an organization.

A second important principle noted by von Bertalanffy is that of an open system. What is

an open system? It is a system which relates with its environment in terms of energy and

information. It absorbs matter/energy, even information. Given the Second Principle of

Thermodynamics, a working system dissipates energy while its components and organization are

degraded, leading to the system's demise.

To survive, the system regenerates itself by absorbing matter/energy from its

environment. Therefore, the phenomenon of life consists of the uninterrupted degradation of the

cells of our organisms and, at the same time, of their uninterrupted regeneration/reproduction.

And, therein, lies the most crucial point of the new theory of autonomy. An open system

is an autonomous system whose autonomy, however, relies upon a dependence with its exterior

environment. Therefore, it becomes obvious that the notion of autonomy can only be conceived

in relation with the notion of dependence. This fundamental paradox is contrary to the simple
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 374

view of an autonomy without dependence or of a deterministic dependence without autonomy. It

is also foreign to all worldviews which oppose dependence and independence. Reality imposes

the key symbiosis of autonomy and dependence. The more complex a system, the more

developed its autonomy as well as its multiple dependent relationships. We structure our

psychological, personal, and individual autonomy through the very dependencies to which we

had to submit, such as imposed by the family, school, or college.

The whole autonomy of a human being is an incredible web of interdependencies. It goes

without saying that if we are deprived of that upon which we depend, we are lost and die. The

concept of autonomy is not substance oriented but relative and relational. I am not stating that

the more dependent the more autonomous. There is no reciprocity between the two terms. I am

only saying autonomy cannot be conceived without dependence.

The third key capital concept to found the idea of autonomy is that of auto-organization.

Whereas thinking about organization is only at its beginning, thinking about auto-organization is

even further behind. When one studies the myriad of stars which fill the cosmos, it is striking to

consider that they are not the product of any organization outside themselves. They do not cease

to autoproduce and autoregulate themselves by processes that are internal themselves and;

thereby, producing their own autonomy. Thus, auto-organization can even be found in the

physical universe. However, it is the physical auto-organization which we call life which is even

more striking, because it displays properties which are unknown to the other physical

organizations. It displays informational, computational, communication properties, as well as the

property of autoreproduction. The auto-organization of the living is an organization which

constantly autorepairs and auto-organizes itself (by reproducing molecules that degrade

themselves and cells which degenerate). This organization has been found to be genetically
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 375

'programmed'. But no deus ex machina or pro machina has created this 'program' from the

outside, i.e., this program autoproduced itself with the autoproduction of life and autodeveloped

with the auto-developments of life.

The concept of autoproduction or of auto-organization does not exclude dependency from

the environment; on the contrary, it implies it. Auto-organization is an auto-eco-organizational

fact.

I will not pretend to elucidate this term now; I only would like to indicate that it is

incomprehensible not to take into account the idea of organizational recursion which is unknown

to classical science. A recursive process is one whose products or effects are necessary to its own

regeneration and existence. As an example, a whirlwind is a stationary organization which has a

constant form. However, it consists of an uninterrupted flow. The tip or end of the whirlwind is

at the same time its beginning. Its circular motion constitutes, at the same time, its entity, the

generator and the regenerator of the whirlwind. Similarly, we, living beings, only appear to

constitute strong and stable bodies. Our body would suddenly become rigid and disintegrate if

the cyclical and circular flow of the blood were to stop. More fundamental still, our body only

exists but for the formidable turnover whereby its billions and billions of molecules and cells are

continuously renovated.

There is a recursive process at the level of each cell, where the DNA specifies the

proteins which, themselves, are needed in order for the DNA to specify them. At the level of the

individual/reproduction relation, the individual is produced by a reproduction cycle which, itself,

it produced by the individual which originate from it.

The idea of organizational recursiveness is needed to conceive autoproduction and auto-

organization, and these ideas themselves, allow us to understand the emergence of the self, i.e.,
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 376

of the being and of individual existence, notions which are ignored and invisible to the classical

scientific worldview. This worldview fosters the doubt which sceptics cast upon the being, life,

individuality, when their concepts make them invisible. In one single stroke, one is able to

conceive, at the same time, the autonomy of a living being, its existential dependence upon all

that is essential to its autonomy, as well as any danger that threatens this autonomy from the

environment.

Let us discuss now the concept of individuality. According to the classical view: "Science

only deals with the general". However, this axiom is henceforth obsolete in physics and in

biology. In physics, the 'general laws' that govern the universe are nowadays conceived as

resulting from particular constraints imposed by a particular universe. In biology, it seems

plausible that life sprung from a unique and particular birth process; species do not represent

general classifications in which particular individuals are classified, but particular principles

which produce particular individualities. Even in the unicellular beings, genetically similar

individuals are not absolutely identical, and we know that sexual reproduction is above all a

generator of diversities, i.e., of individuals which are different from one another.

Furthermore, the immunological system of higher level animals demonstrates that in

these organisms, there exists a fundamental link between individuality, particularity, integrity

and autonomy.

The immunological system is a system of defense which operates on the molecular

distinction of the self and the nonself, rejects or destroys that is recognized as nonself, protects

and defends what is recognized as 'self'. Thus, immunology introduced in the life sciences, the

notion of self which implies:

(a) the principle of autorecognition of one's own individuality and

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 377

(b) the value given to this individuality in relation to everything which does not pertain to it.

One can go even further. Given that every living being, uni- or poly-cellular, is a computational

being, i.e., who takes into account internal and external data/facts and applies computations as a

de facto acting person. Therefore, it is the characterization of computo which I already expressed

elsewhere (La Méthode, 2, Life of Life). Individuality is not only different and particular, it is

also subjective. To be a subject is to dispose, via computo of the property of autoreference, i.e.,

to be able to situate oneself in the center of one's universe (ego-centrism). In this sense, the

subject-individual is unique, even when exactly resembling his/her congeneric, as the case of

homozygote twins proves. No matter how identical these twins are from each other, each one has

its own exclusive and individual personality. The property of being a subject is inseparable from

the principle of exclusion according to which, any other being is expelled from the

egocentrical/autoreferent site which confers to this same subject its property and its unity.

Thus situated in the world, the subject-individual is an actor who plays the random game

of life. Here, we recall von Neumann and Morgenstern's The Theory of Games which provided

the first formal foundation of a scientific theory of the competitive interactions among subjects-

individuals. In fact, reality in which these subjects-individuals operate is much more complex

than that represented by a single egocentrical player. The real-world subject is, at the same time,

egocentric and genocentric (i.e., dedicated to one's family, to the production of descendents, to

the protection and defense of its children) and, where society exists, sociocentric. Egocentricity,

genocentricity, sociocentricity are, at the same time, complementary, competing and antagonistic

notions; their relation is complex. It also means that the living subject-individual's autonomy,

while being dependent upon the environment, is also dependent upon its genetic tree and to the

society to which it belongs.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 378

The living autonomy develops in a paradoxical manner. At the start, autotrophic entities

from which vegetables develop, are capable of transforming light into solar energy and are

autonomous with respect to heterotrophic entities which cannot usefully capture this energy. The

autonomy of the movement of animals develops from this incapacity. Animals must ingest life,

plants, or other animals, and become at the same time, parasites, dependents, and sovereigns of

the vegetal world. Predators are dependent of their prey upon which, in turn, they depend. It is

through this cycle of dependencies/autonomies that animal life developed, as well as the neuro-

cerebral apparatus of animals, their capacity to make computations, to recognize their

environment, and their aptitude to elaborate action strategies. The development of vertebrates, of

mammals, primates, and of human life is inseparable from the neurocerebral development.

It is with homo sapiens, culture, and language that we can conceive of the notion of

freedom. Freedom is not an inherent quality to man. Freedom is an emergent property which,

given favorable internal and external conditions, can be exhibited by man. What is freedom? A

limited view characterizes it as the recognition of what is determined. Another limited view

defines it as what escapes determinism, i.e., identified with chance. In order to have freedom,

there must be a universe where there exist determinisms, consistencies, and regularities upon

which an action can be based. However, there must also be potential for play, chance, and

uncertainties in order for this action to take place. However, the above are only the first external

conditions of freedom. For freedom to exist, fundamental internal conditions must also obtain: a

neurocerebral mechanism capable to define a situation, to postulate hypotheses, and capable to

elaborate alternative strategies. In a word, there must be the possibility of choice, of external

conditions which allow the choice, and internal conditions by which choice can be conceived.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 379

Here, we recall the classical socio-political problems of freedoms and of freedom. We are

free or not, depending on the sociological, economical, and political determinations to which we

are subject.

It is then that one articulates the problem of political freedoms. No doubt, political

pluralism and human rights, in a way, constitute the external conditions which, in certain

domains, allow the possibility of choice and of decision making.

What restricts individual freedoms restricts the possibility of choice. Censorship, which

restricts freedom of information, removes the conditions of knowledge which allow optimal

decision making.

And, therein, lies the paradoxical situation of the human being who is, at the same time,

the most autonomous and most enslaved being extant. The enslavements imposed upon him

inhibit and eliminate his freedom. However, his autonomy can only be defined and freedoms

emerge by virtue of, and through, his dependencies. Hence these paradoxes: we possess genes

which dominate us; they dominate us because they precede our existence, we submit to their

determinations, but at the same time these genes allow us to exist, to act, and, as autoreferent and

egocentric subjects, we appropriate them without, however, ceasing to depend on them. We

make history while history makes us. We are players and actors in society. We depend upon

society which, in turn, depends on us. Society appears to be transcedent external and superior

overlooking being but, it only exists through us and completely disappears as soon as

interactions among individuals stop. In fact, we mutually co-produce each other: individuals

produce society, which, via culture, influences individuals. The autonomy of society depends on

individuals whose autonomy depends upon society.

Conclusions
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 380

The first point is that, in an odd way, the foundations of physics and biology allow us to find a

meaning for the concept of autonomy. We then conceive man as a being, at the same time,

physical, biological, cultural, and psychic. This conceptual anchor is essential to avoid

metaphysical views of autonomy and freedom.

Autonomy, individuality, the subject, and freedom are not metaphysical principles. To conceive

them we need:

(a) A principle of physical complexity which allows relations of order, disorder, and of

organization.

(b) A principle of organizational complexity to understand what is emergence, feedback, and

recursion.

(c) A principle of logical complexity which allows us to conceive the link between autonomy

and dependence. It is then that we possess the conceptual tools to view the relationship between

determinism and freedom, and between autonomy and dependence, as interactive and

associative, rather than as mutually exclusive. Therefore, freedom is separated from its

conditions of emergence but can, in turn, react upon them.

The second point is that a key methodological problem is tied to this new worldview; a

simplifying method can only conceive exterior causality, it divides what is physical and

biological from what is anthropological, reduces complexity to simplicity, can neither conceive

organization nor auto-organization.

If you are the prisoner of the simplifying paradigm (disjunction and reduction), you

cannot conceive of autonomy. However, the fact that you do not see it, does not mean that it does

not exist.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 381

In other words, it is sad to witness that, because the traditional scientist does not see

autonomy, the individual, or life, he concludes that they do not exist. However, this

misconception is still prevalent in our universities.

The third point is that concepts of autonomy, actor, and subject must be removed from

the purely literary and philosophical realms reserved to sociologists. We must provide solid

scientific foundations for their acceptance.

My last point is that the problem of science and of action will be modified by a

worldview which gives meaning to the concepts of actor, autonomy, freedom, and subject - all

concepts that used to be overlooked by the classical simplifying view of science. Such a view

could only conceive beings and individuals as quantities and objects, subject to manipulation.

This view perpetuated the constant schizophrenia to which I alluded at the beginning. It also

promoted manipulation. The manipulation of man over man, of man by the state is only

restrained presently by lags in sociological knowledge. However, if knowledge in sociology were

to reach the level of knowledge in biology, all manipulations would be condoned. We are only

protected by ethics, a term which has no scientific foundation in the classical view because ethics

presupposes the subject.

On the other hand, with the concepts of the new science in gestation in the physical and

biological domains of organizational problems, we will be in a position to recognize in society

not only the processes, regularities, and chance events, but the living beings and individuals as

well. It is then that such a science will allow us to recognize and promote the individual,

collective and ethical aspirations of autonomy and of freedom. It is them that science will cease

to respond to the social question by manipulation, and begin to contribute to the profound

aspirations of humanity.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 382

Notes
1. Reprinted from Human Systems Management, 3, Morin, E., Can we conceive of a

science of autonomy?, 201-206., Copyright (1982), with permission from IOS Press.

2. It would appear that the classical vision of society and man which only recognizes

determinisms and determinations is obsolete. The traditional ideas of autonomy,

responsibility, and liberty which derive from our 'subjective' or existential experience

must be modified. A new 'science of autonomy', with origins in biology and shaped by

Cybernetics and System Theory, must be developed.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 383

Chapter 16: What Could Be a Mind Able to Conceive

a Brain Able to Produce a Mind?
What doubt can there be of the presence of the spirit within us? To give up the illusion that sees

in it an immaterial “substance" is not to deny the existence of the soul, but on the contrary to

begin to recognize the complexity, the richness, the unfathomable profundity of the genetic and

cultural heritage and of the personal experience, conscious or otherwise, which together

constitute this being of ours: the unique and irrefutable witness to a truth, in the lives of all of us.

Jacques Monod in Chance and Necessity1

There is no borderline between life and the mind.

Etienne Wolff

If, in our time, someone decided to deduce the intellectual or spiritual phenomenology from

glandular activity, he could be assured a priori of the esteem and concentration of his audience;

if, on the other hand, someone else thought he saw, in the atomic disintegration of celestial

matter, an emanation of the creator-spirit of the world, this same audience could only deplore the

mental aberration of the author. However, these two explanations are equally logical, equally

metaphysical, equally arbitrary, and equally symbolic… The hypothesis of mind is no more

fantastic than that of matter.

C.G. Jung

The Extraordinary Problem

The brain is without doubt the least well-known of all the continents explored by scientific

knowledge. Yet this unknown is the source of all knowledge. And presenting even more
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 384

uncertainty is the abyss of ignorance concerning the nature of the relationship between the brain

and the mind. There is even incredible disagreement about the sense and relevance of the word

mind, yet the two notions of brain and mind are as inextricably intertwined as the Gordian knot.

Around this knot turn visions of the world, of man, and of knowledge, that can only be cut by a

strike of a barbarian sword.

In a sense, mind and brain are two aspects of the same thing. But at the same time, what

an ontological, logical, epistemological gap exists between them! What have these jelly-like

brains to do with ideas, religion, philosophy, goodness, pity, love, poetry, freedom? This limp

mass, as astonishing as the termite queen’s abdomen, how can it generate discourse, meditation

and knowledge? How can it be that this substance that has no feeling can cause us pain? What

does this unfeeling magma know of the misery and happiness it lets us feel?

The mind has an incredible natural blindness to this brain, without which it would not

exist. What does the mind know about the brain? Spontaneously, NOTHING. It was only the

practice of medicine that discovered, with Hippocrates, the spiritual role of the brain, and it was

only experimental knowledge that began to explore it.

Thus there is simultaneously an ontological abyss and a mutual mystery between, on the

one hand, a cerebral organ composed of regions and strata which bring together tens of billions

of neurons, themselves linked by networks of unimaginable complexity, and animated by

electrical and chemical processes, and on the other hand the image, the idea, and thought. The

mind knows nothing, in itself, of the brain that produces it, and the brain in turn knows nothing

of the mind it produces. They know without knowing each other. Their unity produces awareness

even though they are unaware of it. Of course, one can speak separately about the mind and the

brain, and they are studied independently, the mind in social science departments, and the brain
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 385

in the biological science departments. Psycho-sciences and neuro-sciences do not usually

communicate, even though the most basic question for both is their relationship.

The Great Schism

The mind and brain thus remain two notions condemned either to complete disunity or to

reductionism (of the brain to the mind). The Great Disunity that has reigned over western culture

since the seventeenth century has relegated the brain to the domain of science, and made it obey

the deterministic and mechanistic laws of matter, while the mind exists insubstantial, creative

and free in the domain of philosophy and the humanities. When these two domains meet, they

wage the great metaphysical war of the free mind against deterministic Nature with the main

battle being fought on the terrain of the mind-brain relationship.

These two metaphysical obsessions of materialism and spirituality have coincidentally

spurred various research methods and infected any reflection on the mind and the brain, which

has been rent between the alternatives of materialism or spirituality. These two attitudes must;

however, be understood. It is understandable that the mind first appeared to be a superior entity

because it is conscious and directs thought, decisions, and actions and that the world seems

animated by a spiritual principle. Starting in the nineteenth century; however, mind was forced to

descend from heaven and undergo, in the universe of science, a terrible degradation. The Mind of

God, according to the Scripture and to theological reason, created the world, life, and humanity.

The creation descended from superior to inferior. But with Lamarck and then with Darwin, a

reversal occurred: everything now began from the lowest point and then grew upwards, evolving

toward the heights, and the mind became the greatest fruit of evolution, no longer the first

principle of creation. At the same time, the science of the nineteenth century spread materialistic

determinism into all realms at the expense of the mind.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 386

From then on, it is natural that the material monism of a Vogt, for example, can be

triumphantly affirmed. He said that the brain “excretes feelings like the kidneys excrete urine.”

The mind, from this viewpoint, can only be like the Self, the ghost of the machine.

At any rate, the discoveries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have revealed the

skills and the performance of the brain in organizing memory, language, and thought and thus

have caused the ebb of spirituality. However, in this defeat, Bergson fights his battle of the

Marne, which creates a stable front of resistance. Bergson recognizes the beneficial results of

brain research, but only to confirm his idea that the mind manifests itself in all parts of the brain,

which is only an “image” produced by the mind. From this point on, while the materialists

continue to call the mind an epiphenomenon, spiritually oriented people try to conceive of the

brain as a sort of network that captures “transmaterial” messages which are transmitted in a

psychic or information field. The brain does not “produce” the mind, but “detects” it (Burt,

Eccles). The information that penetrates the senses “materializes” in chemical substances and

neuronal changes, which register physically the symbolic meaning of sensory perceptions.

These spiritual conceptions, forced to compromise with the material reality of the brain,

result in a collaborative dualism or interaction, which accepts the fact that spiritual reality

requires the cooperation of a material reality to carry out its operations.

This spiritual resistance on the mind-brain front is bolstered by a reversal in the situation

where materialism had won its most decisive victory, that is, in the basis of physical reality. The

collapse of material substantiality at the subatomic level gave rise to an enigma and a mystery,

and there spirituality rushed in, hoping to reconquer the world not in spite of, but due to the

progress of science.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 387

Here we cannot opt for either one of the two hypotheses in conflict, but we can support

the question asked by each one:

1. The first question has become absolutely crucial since the last century; “the mind, after

having explained everything, is itself in need of explanation” (Bateson 1980, 98).

2. The second question is raised by contemporary physics: matter, after having explained

everything, must be explained.

The brain cannot explain the mind; furthermore it needs the mind to explain itself. Thus the brain

cannot conceive a brain except via the mind, which itself cannot conceive a mind except via the

brain.

From now on, then, we must refuse to consent to the elimination of the mind by the brain

(science) and the brain by the mind (philosophy). Each one of these paths leads to a strange

aberration. The philosopher’s pure mind needs a philosopher endowed with brains. On the other

hand, it is the mind and consciousness of the scientists that conceived of a universe without mind

and without consciousness.

Whence this double blindness? How can there be such willful unseeing in each of these

metaphysics? We believe it is because both are suffering the effects of the same paradigm, the

paradigm that forces an absolutely clear choice between the one and the double, that is, between

monism or dualism. These two antagonistic conceptions of materialism or spiritualism in their

pretensions for hegemony follow the first paradigm; thus, materialism reduces everything

spiritual to a pure emanation of matter, and spiritualism reduces everything material to an

emanation of the mind. Whenever these two conceptions lose, they are willing to consider two

substances, different in nature linked by causal interactions. In this way, an entire modern

tradition begins with Descartes, passes through Bergson, and ends with Popper-Eccles.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 388

What is thus very difficult to conceive, due to the lack of a paradigm able to confront this

complexity, is the uniduality of the brain-mind relationship; that is, their concurrent unity and

duality concerning existence and reality. Any consideration of this duality has a tendency to

destroy its profound unity, and any consideration of this profound unity tends to destroy its

insurmountable duality (such is the case, as we will see later on, with the “double aspect”

theories or theories of co-reference).

Uniduality
The brain demands recognition: the more we learn about it, the more we recognize its powerful

organizational reality. The mind, for its part, retreats, is worn away, breaks up, becomes

dependent, even in the least of its operations, on molecular interactions; it loses its autonomy and

evaporates as a result of a deterministic or reductionist principle.

We must recognize, however, even as an epiphenomenon, the unique reality of the mind,

which takes the form of images, ideas, concepts, thought. The issues of the mind, even though

dependent on the brain, are nevertheless objects of a kind: language, logic, ideas or theory. By

virtue of this, there can be no doubt that the human mind really does exist. But what kind of

existence does it have? What reality does it experience? This can only be understood through an

articulation, not an exclusion, of the reality and existence of the brain, and this articulation

cannot be abstract and separate, as we will see, from either the whole human being or from

culture and society.

Thus we must confront uniduality, which is the problem of the unity and inseparability of

the two differing and irreducible realities. No operation of the mind can escape a local and

general activity of the brain, and we must give up any idea of a human psychic phenomenon

independent of a bio-physical phenomenon.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 389

At this point, the paradox of uniduality reappears: what is inseparable here are the two

universes, the two types of organization. On one hand, via the brain-organ, there are the wiring

and neuronal networks, the inter-neuronal activities and communications, the entire biological

organization, and, underlying it, the physico-chemical processes. On the other hand, via the

mind, we have ideas, language, logic, communications and socio-cultural organization, which is

to say, trans-cerebral and meta-biological processes. Whence, once more, we encounter the

ontological and logical gap between the spheres of the bio-physical (brain) and the socio-cultural

(mind). What relationship could there possibly be at this level? Does this relationship go from

the product to the producer? From effect to cause?

Here again there appears on a first level of analysis the indisputable relationship of

dependence, both between the mind and brain, and between the socio-cultural and the bio-

physical spheres. We can act chemically, electrically and anatomically on all the characteristics

of the mind, either to modify them, stimulate them, or suppress them. We can destroy

consciousness by means of sections or lesions of certain parts of the brain. We can modify states

of consciousness through the use of drugs. We can manipulate consciousness and render it

unaware of the manipulations it is undergoing. Electrical or chemical interference to certain

zones of the brain can provoke visions, hallucinations, feelings, emotions, all of which

demonstrate that the mind can be made to submit blindly to physico-chemical modifications.

Furthermore, we are constantly learning that psychological states are strictly dependent on a lack

or excess of one or another molecular constituent (thus, depression corresponds to a reduction of

serotonin in the brain).

But here is a product that can react upon its producer, an effect that can react on its cause.

All the psychosomatic phenomena point to a causal circularity, where the mind itself acts on the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 390

brain, and via the brain on the organism, that is, on the bio-chemical-physical processes

themselves.

Furthermore, the extraordinary psycho-cultural phenomenon that is faith can, via the

brain, motivate the healing or ruin of the organism on which the psyche and culture depend by

provoking through magic a cure or death (thus placebos, witches, and miracles heal one third of

all sick people). The awareness of a taboo, or a spell or a curse can kill. In the example of yogis

who are able to control by asceticism—or by discipline of the will—muscles and organs like the

heart, the problem of the relative autonomy of the mind and these examples—belief, faith,

willpower—indicate both the world of the mind, which is simultaneously the world of culture:

myths, religions, ideas…

Again, we recognize that the mind experiences determining influences, which are not

only those of the cerebral organization nor those of events lived or experienced by the individual,

especially during his childhood, but also those resulting from a cultural imprinting, unchangeable

influences taking place in the family, school, university, culture. Thus, via the mind, these socio-

cultural determinations are imposed in the very construction of the links and circuits between

synapses, creating, in the geography of the brain itself, routes, tracks and pathways traced and

marked by culture.

We must understand that knowledge, even of bio-cerebral determinations, comes both

from the mind (researchers working in the neuro-sciences) and from socio-cultural reality, which

is the scientific institution. And finally, human intelligence also generates interferences or

manipulations in the brain. Even more, there are awesome transcerebral entities which constitute

modern nation-states, which attempt to control all brains in order to subdue all minds!
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 391

Let us not forget that it was the human mind that first went in search of the brain; later,

psycho-cultural activity discovered that the brain produced the mind. The mind formulated

hypotheses and sought clarification of its own relationship with the brain through scientific effort

and through cultural, historical and social effort as well. It is through the study of the brain that

the mind confirms itself in its ability to discover and to think and then to govern and control its

own source. The brain allows itself to be manipulated by its spiritual epiphenomena. Or rather, it

is the uniduality of mind/brain—in the deepest part of a socio-cultural collectivity—that can only

organize itself around interactions between minds/brains that operates these controls bearing on

the cerebral aspect, which thus can no longer be regarded as the supreme controller of the

spiritual and the cultural.

The relationship of brain to mind cannot be thought of simply as that of producer to

product, of cause to effect, of the emanating to the emanated. There is a degree of relative

autonomy, reciprocal action, mutual control that must be understood and explained. How? By a

return to dualism? By the elaboration of a new monism, which would be neither spiritual nor

material? Again, we must face the mutilating paradigmatic demand that we choose between the

two terms of the alternative. This dualism is one of complementarity between two heterogeneous

realities, of which one has an absolute need for the support of the other. Thus there is

complementarity between the material entities (brain, organism) and the “transmaterial”

entities2, which are information, symbols, and values, and we can imagine a morphological

balance between the neuro-cerebral forms and the symbolic-informational forms.3

The New Monism

The new monism notes the impossibility of unity, either on the material basis (brain) or the

spiritual basis (mind). From this springs the theses of identitism and co-reference. The theory of
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 392

identitism posits the identity of cerebral and mental states, which are co-referents for the same

object. They both refer to one and the same identity.

It is precisely this contradiction that we must neither hide nor avoid, but face squarely.

But affirming it would be to betray the paradigm of supposedly logical thought, for which the

appearance of a contradiction can only mean the appearance of an error. From the point of view

of complex thought; however, the very complexity of reality is expressed in the development of

relationships which, from a conceptual point of view, are at once complementary, competitive,

and antagonistic. It is the same for the idea of unitas multiplex and for the idea of uniduality that

we proposed. It is the same in the relationship between the mind and the brain, as Andre

Bourguignon lucidly observed:

The solution to the matter-mind relationship can only be contradictory; the body (nervous

encephalic activity) and the mind (psychic activity) are at the same time identical,

equivalent and different, distinct. A solution demands that one never prefer one of the

terms of the contradiction to the other, especially in scientific research (Bourguignon

1981. 397).

In considering the contradiction, we have been led to the paradoxal circularity of the two notions

of brain and mind. Indeed, if the brain can be considered an instrument of thought, thought can

be considered a tool of the brain. The mind can be seen as a typical product of the brain, but even

the notion of brain must be conceived of as a typical product of the mind: the brain is a

conceptualization engendered by the mind. Sensorial reality, which has reached sensory

terminals and been translated, coded, and transmitted to the brain, is itself recognized by our

mind after a long process of intellectual elaboration, the fruit of the development of scientific

knowledge in the historical conditions which permitted this development. Thus, in order to
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 393

understand that our senses are affected by variations in energy (mechanical modifications for

hearing and touch, chemical modifications for the sense of smell, photonic modifications for our

vision), a previous elaboration of the concept of energy was first necessary; this invisible and

abstract entity only becomes aware of itself through its modifications. This means that, even to

conceive of a physical reality which affects our brain and allows our brain to know the world

around it, it was necessary at the outset to develop a spiritual fabric saturated with cultural

substance. A specific work of the mind was needed at the very heart of a culture to allow it to

conceive of the obvious physical reality that affects our senses and the obvious biological reality

that constitutes our brain. Thus, as objective as they may be, the physical universe, its

modifications of energy, our senses, and our brains are themselves but representations of our

mind. This unidual activity of brain/mind produces a conception of physical reality at the same

time as it recognizes its own reality.

Thus it is not only the mind that directs us to the brain and to the physical reality that

generates knowledge; it is also physical reality and the brain that direct us to the reality of the

mind, which is necessary in order to conceive them both. In a sense, the brain and the physical

world are both products of the mind. Provided we do not forget that, from the point of view of

the evolution of the physical world, the biological world and especially the animal world, the

mind is the product of the brain.

What appears, then, is a type of circle, where, each term hellishly directs us to the other

term, and then is metamorphosed into the other. Gerald Holton cites the excellent example of

Hermann Weyl:

“As we know, the chalk of the blackboard is composed of molecules which are made up

of elementary particles. In analyzing what theoretical physics means by such words, we

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 394

have seen that these physical objects melt into a symbolism which can be manipulated by

certain rules; but these symbols, in turn, are finally only substantial signs written in chalk

on a blackboard.”

It is indeed a metaphorical circle between the brain and the mind. The mind is an outgrowth of

the brain, which is itself a representation of the mind. The mind is, as an activity, a product of the

brain, itself a biological organ that can only be recognized by the mind in and through a cultural

organization. Thus, in a circle always mediated by a society and a culture, the brain can only

conceive of itself via the mind, but the mind can conceive of itself only via the brain. Whence the

paradox we must finally face: what is a mind that can conceive of the brain that produces it, and

what is the brain that can produce a mind that conceives of it?

It is now clear to us that any concept of the brain that does not take into account the

paradoxical Gordian knot of the brain-mind relationship would be distorting. The spiritualist

vision, if it ignores the brain, cannot do justice to the mind itself. But any knowledge of the brain

that cannot acknowledge the mind, or worse yet, that excludes it, becomes absurd because it

becomes incapable of acknowledging itself. Scientific knowledge can no longer deny the mind

without which it would not exist. But above all and ironically, this negation is an example of the

amazing power of the mind, because in this case it is the mind that becomes blind to itself, and

thus becomes incapable of accepting its very existence because it will not admit that it is made of

matter!

The Idea of Subject

We come back to the idea, already apparent in the notions of computo and cogito, that everything

that concerns mind or psyche is incomprehensible without the notion of subject (and that is why

the notions of mind, psyche and subject are generally rejected all at once). Certainly, Lacan’s
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 395

successors thought they could preserve the psyche by excluding the subject and by replacing it

with a sort of anonymity (The “one,” the “it”), but they lost the very reality of the psyche. “If our

brain is a television set, who is watching it?” asked Francis Crick. We obviously need a reflexive

duality, which is authorized by the ego circuit constituting the “I am me,” so that the mind can

recognize itself individually as considering its own cognition.

Thus we can now envisage the organ, brain, neuro-cerebral equipment, the emerging

qualities of the intelligence, the mind, and the psyche as many instances and moments of a same

organizing, recursive, complex reality, which only becomes substantial through its own activity.

Conclusions
1. We can and must from now on reintegrate the mind with the physis (on this term, cf.

Method 1) and the physis with the mind. We can even, in the same movement, reintegrate

the mind with the bios and the bios with the mind.4

But to do this, we must stop thinking on the basis of the paradigm of simplification

(disjunction or reduction), which can only separate the two terms or submerge the one in

the other.

2. We have made the stupefying discovery that billions of billions of interactions among

thirty billion neurons and a million billion synapses make up one mind, one thought, one

judgment, one will.

That is because they are integrated/integrators in a recursive dynamism—that of the brain-

mind—which is, at the same time, the computo-cogito, which constructs a being-egocentric

subject. Kant spoke of the unification (synthesis) achieved by the judgment of the thinking

subject, to which must be added that the unifying act is a computo-cogito. The unifying cogito
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 396

produces at the same time the knowing computo subject, which transcends itself by the very

movement of its production. However, let us remember that this movement of

production/organization can in no way be reduced to the category of the individual-subject,

which can only be comprehended in the circle of auto-(geno-pheno-ego-socio-)eco-

reorganization. This circle is logically basic for conceiving the notion of individual-subject and

becomes logically basic for conceiving and integrating the notions of body, brain, mind, and

psyche, because it must be absolutely understood that the thing that knows is neither a brain nor

a mind, but a being-subject that knows by means of the mind/brain. “A human being is a human

being, neither an observer hidden away in his own sensorium, nor a brain with arms” (Stephen

Toulmin).

Everything that concerns the being, however, concerns the mind/brain, and everything

that concerns the mind/brain concerns the being. “The mind that animates action is animated by

the action of the whole being” (Method 2. 290). The spiritual processes need the cerebral

processes, which in turn need the physiological processes, the body’s machine regulating blood

pressure, the rhythm of the heart, gastro-intestinal secretions, which in turn are controlled by the

neuro-vegetative system, which is regulated by the neurocerebral equipment, which…

“A human being creates itself and recreates itself in a self-starting process of

animation/corporalization. The mind is neither the renter nor the owner of the body. The body is

neither the hardware, nor the servant of the mind. They are both constituent elements of an

individual who is endowed with the quality of subject.” (Method 2) This seemingly substantial

body is only the concrete form of computing interactions of a being-machine that

produces/organizes/regulates itself.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 397

Thus the mind-brain is reintegrated into the whole body, but we must also reintegrate the

human being within society, which allows the fact-collecting of his/her brain to develop into

thinking, via the language and the learning that is stored there. Without culture, the human mind

could not reach thinking and would be stuck at the data-processing level of the lowest class of

primates.

Thus, we can see that the problem of knowledge does not have only one, unique source:

Complex is within us, and, at each moment, in its own way, it contains many parts:

Insert Figure 46

Thus we can reintegrate the mind-brain with humanity and reintegrate humanity in the animal

realm it surpasses, but simultaneously contains and conserves. The humanity of knowledge is

actually the union of the “animality” of knowledge and the humanity of knowledge.

Notes
1. Monod, Jacques. Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern

Biology. Wainhouse, Austryn (trans.). New York: Vintage Books, 1972.

2. As José Delgado states: “Without a brain, the mind could not exist. Without sensory

input, the mind would not be structured and could not appear. Without manifestations of

inner perceptions, and outward motor expression, the mind would not be recognized by

the individual or the environment.”

3. If mental representation is an “imaginal” configuration attached to an ad hoc

interneuronal configuration, then we could conceive of a reciprocal effect from one to the

other, the same as in hypnotic or magic suggestion wherein the imaginal configuration

introduced from outside can determine the interneuronal configuration in which the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 398

psychosomatic processes of modification of the organism’s states (by placebo, magic,

witchcraft, etc.) would intervene. This would allow us to understand that a belief or an

idea could modify a being.

4. “The living mind. The word living is of capital importance. The grandiose inscription

written on the stone façade of Heidelberg University, Am lebendige Geist, (To the living

spirit), salutes in the interpretation proposed here, no longer represents the immaterial

substance descended from on high to inspire master-thinkers, but the mind born from life,

which can only unfold through becoming more and more alive. The living mind does not

withdraw from life; it develops life in itself, in us. The human mind is no longer isolated

far from life,but develops a new life—the life of the mind in a new world, the world of

the mind” (La Méthode 2. 290).

References
Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Chandler.

Bourguignon. A. (1981). Fondements neurobliologiques pour une theorie de la

psychopathologie. Psychiatric de l’enfant XXIV.

Morin. E. (1981). La méthode 2 la vie de la vie. Paris: Seuil.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 399

Chapter 17: The Emergence of Thought

If we consider human thought as the, so far, ultimate, if not supreme, stage in the

evolution of life on Earth, we must also try to understand the evolutionary conditions that

allowed it to emerge, and that leads us to look again at living organization.

The Prehistory of Thought

Whatever the origins of life (cf. the text of Jacques Reisse, p. 53), it is clear that the oldest

living organization, that of a protobacteria, is extremely complex in its functional and

complementary association of extremely diverse macro-molecules, and that this complexity

includes in particular: a) the organization of exchanges with an environment from which it

draws both matter-energy and organization; b) a permanent process of self-reorganization

through the replacing of molecules that have deteriorated and through the production of new

ones; c) the organization of the self-reproduction of the creature through division. An

organization of this kind includes a quasi-informational dimension (the hereditary message

inscribed in the genes and the capacity to extract information from the environment), a

quasi-computational dimension (the processing of data, via indices or quasi-signs from the

interior and exterior), and a communicational dimension (internal RNA-protein communication

and external communication with its congeners). In short, from the beginning, a living

being is the product/producer of a self-eco-organization the nature of which is at the same

time computational, informational, and communicational. In other words, within every living

organization, there is a cognitive dimension, but this cognitive dimension is undifferentiated within it.

This cognitive dimension not only allows the self-eco-organization of the living

being, but also allows it to distinguish the self from the non-self, to move toward food

sources, to flee from danger, and to resist aggression. Without this original cognitive
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 400

dimension, inherent in living self-eco-organization, the developments of knowledge and

intelligence that have led to thought would not have taken place.

When one considers the world of bacteria, which spread throughout the Earth,

one sees that there are "gifts" of information from one bacteria to another. Initially, these were

interpreted as a sexual act, because the donor bacteria put out a sort of tube, like a tanker

aircraft that became attached to the receiver in order to inject it with a gene, in other words

with some quasi-information or a program. It has been observed that this is the method

through which resistance to antibiotics is communicated. Sorin Sonea has proposed the

hypothesis, taken up by Lynn Margulis, that the totality of bacteria on Earth form a kind of

macro-organism that is necessary to the life of all living species and whose constituent parts

exchange information from one to the next.

Polycellular plants have neither a nervous system nor the equivalent of a brain. Yet,

they devise various strategies to enjoy the sunshine, absorb water, repel neighboring roots (in

this way, radishes secrete a poison that puts off intrusive roots), and attract nectar gathering

insects. It has recently been discovered that trees of the same species are able to communicate

with one another in order to pass on the alarm against a pathogen. This means that the whole

network of inter-computations between the cells of a plant constitutes a sort of natural

computer that is undifferentiated and that not only implements the genetic quasi-program, but

also elaborates strategies that are adapted to circumstances.

Here we can differentiate between the notion of "program" and of "strategy." A

program determines a sequence of operations according to a goal, but, whereas a program,

which is fixed and without any variation, assumes a stable environment, strategy includes

plans and scenarios that can be modified according to risks, threats, and opportunities.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 401

The animal adventure, especially the development of vertebrates, allowed—starting

with the formation and increase in complexity of the neuro-cerebral system—the

differentiation and development of cognitive abilities, especially cognitive strategies, which,

starting from a certain number of signs, allow the recognition of traces or the presence of

food, prey, or a predator. The development of cognitive strategies, that is to say, intelligence,

goes hand in hand with the development of behavior strategies, that is to say not just cognitive

but also practical intelligence. This strategic intelligence, which is highly developed among

birds, mammals, and primates, includes an ever greater ability to improvize and invent. It i s

these abilities that allow new and unexpected problems to be resolved. There are already

many observations that show that tits, mice, and squirrels succeed in overcoming a sequence

of difficulties and obstacles that the human experimenter puts between them and their food.

One can talk of intelligence when there is a cerebral ability to appropriately combine

programs and strategies. Intelligence can be defined as the ability to process and resolve

problems in complex conditions (a wide variety of information, interference because of

"noise," the presence of uncertainties, confusion of inter-retroactions, variations in the

situation, and sudden risks).

Societies are complex systems of association between animals endowed with means of

locomotion and a cerebral or ganglionic nervous system. Societies are much more numerous

than had been thought for a long time and they show us the coming together of individual

intelligences with a collective intelligence resulting from interaction between the individual

intelligences. In this way, an anthill can look to us like a sort of collective brain with myriads

of legs. The anthill has cognitive and strategic organizing abilities that the ants, taken
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 402

individually, do not have, each one being like a neuron of the collective brain. But this brain

would not exist without the incessant inter-retro-actions between the individuals.

There is certainly a collective intelligence in mammalian societies, in particular in

hunting strategies like that, for example, put into effect by wolves. But intelligence develops,

above all, in and through the individuals. It is there that the strategic qualities of a cerebral

system capable of correctly posing problems and resolving them—qualities that, as we have

seen, define intelligence—manifest themselves and are developed.

The cerebral system processes and organizes, through perception or representation, the

information that the sensory networks have elaborated, starting from the stimuli that have

been captured by their nerve endings (ocular, olfactory, tactile, and so on). It operates an

analytic and synthetic understanding of the perceptions, and effects its cognitive strategies to

detect danger, opportunity, prey, predator, enemy, congener, and so on. It determines scenar -

ios for conduct and chooses the one that seems the most promising and the least risky. It uses

stratagems from its repertoire or invents them. This same brain stores acquired experience. It

is capable of learning. The richer the brain is in innate abilities or aptitudes, the more it is able

to acquire knowledge and invent strategies. One sees that, among primates and above all with

hominization, innate programs tend to decrease and concentrate on sexual behavior, while

innate structures, appropriate for the elaboration of strategies to resolve problems, tend to

increase.

We also see that affective development and the development of intelligence go hand in

hand. One might think that affectivity, in the form of fear, anger, and blind desire, would

interfere with intelligence. But affectivity, understood as the deep involvement of the whole

being in relations with others and with congeners, develops, along with affection, friendship,
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 403

love, and interpersonal and social relations; it gives rise to a great need to commu nicate, and it

stimulates and intensifies a curiosity that goes beyond the immediate interests of security,

feeding, and copulation. Certainly, curiosity is dangerous and, as the proverb says, killed the

cat. But it gives life to a drive to explore and examine that, remarkable in primates and

chimpanzees ("as curious as a monkey"), turns, among humans, into intellectual curiosity, the

search for hidden meaning, and gives human thought a stimulus that is unknown to artificial

computers.

For their part, chimpanzees, our cousins and not our ancestors as Coppens has

indicated (p. 112), have developed a strategic intelligence capable of making tools for special

purposes from a branch or stone. They have abilities that have been revealed by communi -

cation with humans. In this way, Washoe, the young female chimpanzee raised by the

Gardners, was able, on the basis of a language similar to deaf-and-dumb language, to learn a

vocabulary of several dozen words, to use a rudimentary syntax, to be capable of metaphor

(having learned the meaning of the word "dirty," she was able to say "dirty rascal" to a person

who had annoyed her), and to name herself when looking at her reflection in a mirror

(Gardner and Premack).

Language and the Emergence of Thought

The adventure of hominization brought about related developments of the brain, of

technology, of social interaction, of individuality, and the appearance and development of

culture—a set of rules, norms, and knowledge that make up the generative capital of human

social complexity. The emergence of a doubly articulated language, in which groups of

phonemes devoid of meaning formed meaningful words and phrases, constituted a decisive

stage. Examination of skulls shows us (cf. Coppens, p.124) that Homo erectus already had the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 404

cerebral and glottal capacities to use a language of that kind. As with all the great moments of

creation, such as the creation of the Earth or the beginning of life, we are unable to grasp the

event, or chain of singular events, that caused this language to be born. It is quite plausible

that, up to a certain moment, hominids possessed a language that was both gestural and

phonic ("call system"), which enabled them to express and to communicate a certain amount

of information and a certain number of emotions. In the same way that, with the origin of life,

the organization of multiple, diverse macro-molecules constituted a "pressure of complexity"

that allowed the emergence of a chemical, organizational, doubly articulated language that we

call "genetic code," a sociological and psychological "pressure of complexity" was necessary,

so that as soon as there was a need, there emerged a vocal language with greater, in fact

almost unlimited, possibilities that went beyond a saturated "call system." If it is probable that

this language was necessary for the emergence of Homo sapiens, it is certain that it has been

found to be consubstantially essential in all the societies of Homo sapiens.

Human language is very varied and has many functions. It expresses, observes,

describes, transmits, conceals, proclaims, prescribes, and argues. It is present in all inter-

human, cognitive, communicative, and practical operations and even allows the individual

spirit to communicate with itself (inner speech, an interior monologue that is more of an

interior dialogue). It is necessary to cultural preservation, transmission, and innovation. It is

consubstantial with the organization of all human societies in enunciating their rules, norms,

and myths.

In every tongue, language obeys very complex rules of grammar, syntax, and

vocabulary, and these rules themselves obey cerebral abilities that are themselves very
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 405

complex. Language is a kind of machine that functions in a way inseparably associated with a

system of logical and analogical computation.

Thanks to language, every cognitive operation, every gain, every fantasy can be

named, classified, stored, remembered, communicated, examined, criticized, made conscious.

Words, notions and concepts act as discriminators, selectors and polarizers for all intellectual

activities. The human spirit can explore infinite possibilities of thought through combining

words, sentences, and ideas.

In other words, at the same time as language, the ingredients proper to thought sprang

up. They were added to intelligence, developed it, and precisely transformed it into thought.

Whereas an animal intelligence exists that functions through computation without language,

human intelligence was able to develop in an extraordinary fashion through language, and

language and, furthermore, allowed cogitation or thought. Cogitation (thought) emerges from

the computational operations of the cerebral machine, retroacts on these computations, uses

them, transforms them and develops them, while expressing itself in language. Language

allows thought to process not only those things that precede language (action, perception,

memory, dream) but also those that arise from language itself — discourse, ideas, and

problems with ideas.

By and in language, thought can consider, elucidate, conceptualize and study, that is to

say it can act as thought.

Consciousness in inseparable from thought that is itself inseparable from language.

Consciousness is the emergence of reflexive thought, turning on itself, on its own operations,

within a subject aware of itself and of its actions or feelings.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 406

Thus, we can recognize thought as a specific and complex activity of the human spirit

that encompasses the spheres of language, logic and consciousness (while it also inclu des

sublinguistic, subconscious and sub- or meta-logical processes). Thought is the full, dialogic

use of the cogitative abilities of the human spirit. This dialogic elaborates, organizes and

develops conceptions, models, configurations and plans of intelligibility, that, in philosophical

thought, become concepts and systems of ideas.

The Use of Dual Thought

Our prehistoric ancestors, hunter-gatherers whose societies were pushed back by historical

societies and then exterminated during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, had for tens of

thousands of years used, in their strategies of knowledge, craftsmanship, and action an

empirical, rational, technical thought that allowed them to produce, organize, and

accumulate an extraordinary botanical, zoological, ecological, and technological knowledge

that constituted a real ancient science. But these same ancient peoples accompanied all their

practical and technical actions with rites, beliefs, myths and magic, and, very naively, early

twentieth century anthropologists believed that these "primitive" people were enclosed in

magical, mythical thought and knew nothing of rationality. In fact, ancient humanity (as

contemporary humanity continues to do, but in a very different way) elaborated, associated, and

combined empirical, rational, technical thought with symbolic, mythological, magical thought.

Symbolic, mythological, magical thought has a collective pole and an individual

pole. The collective pole is found in the myths that situate the society in a universe

populated with gods and spirits and that give its members a common ancestor. They are

inseparable from rites, gestures, sign language, and spoken words of a symbolic and magical

character. Mythical, ritual associations give a society its unity, identity, and cohesion. The
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 407

individual pole is to be found in ancient self-consciousness, where the individual recognizes

his own being in his double that manifests itself in an image or reflection and that, being non-

corruptible by nature, escapes death in order to become a spirit or ghost. One of the most

powerful sources of human thought, not only in its mythological forms but also in its

reflexive forms, comes from the traumatic awareness of death, a simultaneous awareness and

refusal of the loss of individuality. This is the place where, in all human societies, myths,

rites, and religions find one of their permanent sources of nourishment.

The rise of the great historic civilizations, which began 10,000 years ago, brought

about the development of the two kinds of thought as well as the dialectic between them.

Symbolic, mythological, magical thought was developed, transformed, and integrated into

religious thought. Empirical, rational, technical thought was able to carry out admirable and

enormous tasks of building cities, palaces, pyramids, and temples, and was able to create

irrigation, pipework, navigation, and transportation systems. This empirical, rational, technical

thought brought about progress in many directions, not only outside the religious sphere but

also within it, in particular in the field of astronomy that, for a long time, remained closely

linked to astrology.

The emergence and use of writing in these civilizations provided thought with a

support and a vehicle that allowed communication and confrontation. It also made it possible

to abstract, correct, reflect, and meditate on texts. These conditions allowed philosophical

thought to take flight.

The Seculariztion and Individualization of Thought

In the era of the great theocratic empires, according to Jaynes' hypothesis, everything took

place as though the spirit of every individual was made up of two separate rooms: one in
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 408

which the divine, imperial order reigned, the other occupied by everyday affairs and

problems. Only a narrow, theological elite devoted itself to thought. Then, everything took

place as though, with the retreat of the theocratic order and the secularization of politics (as in

fifth century B.C. Athens), a hole appeared in the hermetic seal separating the two rooms.

From that time on, the personal spirit of the subject become citizen, was no longer limited to

the everyday life of the self and those around, but was able to think about the city, the gods,

and the world, and it dared to question them. Thought became both individual and problem-

oriented.

In China, it was during a period of instability when the foundations of power and

noble society were called into question, as a circle of clients in the princely courts was

formed in which rhetoricians, moralists and philosophers flourished. (Lao-tzu and

Confucius date from the fifth century B.C.).

In the Mediterranean, at around the same time, the social, economic, and cultural

conditions of communications and exchange between maritime cities and the collapse of the

great theocratic despotisms created cultural ferment, the necessary condition for a great

excitement of ideas and a multitude of argumentative confrontations.

It was then that personal thought was able to emerge. Personal thought was not the

privilege of a cultivated and literate elite. Through language, it could express itself in

discussions between close relations and friends, in the public square, and, in places where

democracy existed, between citizens. But, and this has not yet come to an end, thought also

developed by means of literature: there is thought in poetry and there is thought in all the

great novels. And, in addition, it constitutes a secular sphere properly devoted to the exercise

of rational thought and argument: the philosophical sphere.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 409

Philosophical thought is a type of thought that, through systems of ideas referring to

abstract entities or concepts, strives to conceptualize the questions that Man asks about the

world, life, reality, and humanity itself. In the East, especially in India, philosophical thought

was able to find its niche in the heart of religion, where it elaborated its concepts, key

relationships (the Atman — Brahman relationship), and propositions. But it was in the Greek

islands, starting from the sixth century B.C., that with thinkers who were no longer priests,

but who were still semi-magi and already sages, there appeared a personal thought that looked

beyond religion and the gods for ideas and concepts that allowed the world to be understood.

Logos, fire, being, the one and the future became the first fundamental notions of Greek

philosophy. Then the great systems of ideas began to form. They tried to understand human

and natural phenomena by means of causality and ends, to know "true" reality hidden behind

phenomena, and, finally, to establish the rules and methods for a correct thought.

Philosophy is born of "astonishment" in the sense that it sets out from

problematization. As we have seen, intelligence involves immediate or practical problem

setting and problem solving. Philosophy poses, in terms of ideas and reasoning, the

fundamental problems that Man cannot resolve in an immediate or practical way.

Unlike religion, philosophy creates a new sphere of thought in which systems of ideas

and arguments conflict with one another without there being any sanctions against or physical

liquidation of opposed ideas. Philosophy and rationality emerged together. Rationality and

argument go hand in hand. Rationality is both a critical method of argument (as opposed to

arbitrary or inconsistent systems of fables) and an attempt to elaborate coherent systems of

ideas, that is to say, those organized logically and not arbitrarily with respect to what is being

elucidated, which are able to take account of the realities of the phenomenal world. Above all,
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 410

rationality is a dialogue between human thought and the empirical world. Rationality

elaborates strategies adapted in each case to the object of its research (cognitive or practical),

which include the use of logical procedures, of tests, of multiple observations, of tests of the

hypothesis, and so on. In this sense, it is a system of stratagems of thought (metis) to unmask

the real that disguises, hides, and transforms itself. When dialogue with the real is interrupted,

rationality degenerates into rationalization, a coherent system of ideas that will no longer

accept being disproved by facts or arguments that negate it.

There is certainly great wisdom contained within the myths of ancient civilization, and

there are profound thoughts in the great religious orthodoxies that are radically rooted in what

is most ancient and most unconscious in the human spirit. But the conditions for the fullest

blooming of the thinking abilities of the human spirit are to be found in centers of cultural

ferment, that is to say in socio-cultural conditions of communication, exchange of ideas

between civilizations, opposition of contrary theses, and great intellectual agitation — in other

words, cultural "heat." This was the case in fifth century B.C. Athens, Renaissance Italy,

seventeenth century Amsterdam, eighteenth century Paris, and so on.

The Modern Adventures of Thought

Starting from the end of the ancient world, Western European thought underwent a singular

adventure. After Christianity, the first great religion of salvation, had become the official

religion of the Empire, philosophical thought was enclosed within the bosom of theology,

was forbidden to question or contest revealed, dogmatic truth, but it did not cease to pose

fundamental questions on the nature of thought (dispute of the Universals) and to preserve in

its heart part of the Greco-Latin heritage that had found a new vitality within Arab

civilizations.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 411

Then, in entirely new historical conditions marked by the increase of trade

between the North Sea and the Mediterranean, the formation of modern capitalism, and, from

the point of view of the conception of the world, the discovery of America and then the

understanding that the Earth was a satellite of the sun, new centers of cultural ferment were

created. Starting with the sixteenth century, a formidable problematization once again

raised questions about the cosmos, nature, life, and Man, and then dared to question not

only nature, but the existence of God. From then on began the adventure of modern Western

thought. The generalized problematic was the search for irrefutable foundations to replace

divine revelation.

The most remarkable event was the separation, starting from the philosophical/critical

branch, of a new kind of thought whose roots certainly went deep into Greek and Indian

antiquity and into the mediaeval Arab world, but that took on an autonomous consistency in

the seventeenth century in the western world: scientific thought.

Scientific thought has undergone an enormous development because it has been animated

by a four-pronged dialogue: imagination/verification, empiricism/rationalism. Whereas

philosophy constitutes an environment for the free discussion of all problems, including those

that are insoluble, science applies itself to the study of empirical reality through the perfect-

ing of methods of observation, experimentation, verification, precision, and exactitude. They

allow the elimination of inadequate or irrelevant theories and allow research to link up with

techniques that are more and more closely associated with and assimilated into it, to form

modern techno-science. Whereas philosophy devotes itself to the search for an ideal truth

as well as to the search for moral truth, science eliminates all value judgements and con-

centrates solely on judgements of fact. At the same time, science makes itself independent of
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 412

politics or religion. But it has become blind to the ethical problems posed, in the twentieth

century, by the enormous, uncontrolled development of the manipulative and destructive

powers of techno-science.

In the twentieth century, the problematic raised by Western philosophy has become

universal and, at the same time, Western science has become universal. The creative character

of this universalization should not allow us to forget the cultural destruction, the

misunderstanding of the great traditions of thought that emerged from other civilizations,

and the threat that the uncontrolled development of techno-science presents for the future of the

human adventure at the dawn of the millennium.

Perhaps a new turning point in the history of thought is taking place in the twentieth

century. The frantic search for foundations, characteristic of Western philosophy from the

seventeenth through the nineteenth century, led to the discovery that it is impossible, not

only for philosophical but also for scientific thought, to find an irrefutable and unchanging

foundation. It led to the discovery that the ultimate foundation, discovered in the nineteenth

century, that of progress assured by the historic future, has itself been seen to be problematic.

Perhaps, a form of thought will emerge that is capable of allying science's concern for

verification with philosophy's reflexive concern, which can recognize the hidden paradigms that

structure and govern it in an occult fashion, which is able to integrate the observer/conceiver

into the observation and the conception, which can, through an open rationality, meet the

challenge posed to it by the complexity of the real. The history of thought has not come to an

end and never will, except through natural or human catastrophe.

Conclusion
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 413

Thanks to language and culture, human thought could only emerge and develop in the course

of a process of hominization that itself may only appear as a perhaps unnecessary but, in any

case, possible branch of the evolution of the order of mammals, which had arisen from the

branching out of the vertebrates in an animal kingdom that was itself the consequence of the

abilities of a living organization, itself dependent on a very long and complex chemical and

physical evolution that began in the first seconds of our universe.

In a way, thought gives the impression that there is nothing more cognitive, more

noble, or more disinterested in the human adventure. But it can put itself at the service of

authority, power, faith and illusion. Nevertheless, it also possesses a self-correcting and self-

critical ability that allows it to argue with itself and to pursue a search, born with the human

spirit, to try to conceptualize and understand the great adventure not only of the world, of life,

and of humanity, but also of thought itself.

Note
Reprinted from Diogenes, 39 no. 155, Morin, E., Emergence of thought, 135-146., Copyright

(1991), with permission from Sage Publications, Inc.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 414

References
Chomsky, N. (1968). Language and Mind. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich.

Detienne, M. and Vernant, J.-P. (1974). Les ruses de l'intelligence, La mètis des grecs. Paris:

Flammarion.

Garner, A. and B., Premack, D. (1974). Dialogues avec le singe. in E. Morin and M. Piattelli-

Palmarini (Eds.), Le Primate et l'homme, vol. 1: De l’Unite de l'Homme. Paris: Le Seuil

(Points).

Jaynes, J. (1976). The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind. Boston:

Houghton Mifflin.

Ladriere, J. (1977). Les Enjeux de la nationalité: les défis et de la science et de la technologie

aux cultures. Paris: Aubier Montaigne-UNESCO.

Margulis, L., and D. Sagan. (1989). L'Univers bactériel. Paris: Albin Michel.

Morin, E. (1979). Le Paradigme perdu: la nature humaine. Paris: Le Seuil (Points).

Morin, E. (1977). La Méthode, vol. 1: La Nature de la nature. Paris: Le Seuil.

Morin, E. (1980). La Méthode, vol. 2 La Vie de la vie. Paris: Le Seuil.

Morin, E. (1986). La Méthode, vol. 3: La Connaissance de la connaissance. Paris: Le Seuil.

Morin, E. (1989). Penser l'Europe. Paris: Gallimard.

Morin, E. (1990). Introduction à la pensée complexe. Paris: E.S.F.

Sonea, S., and M. Paniset. (1980). Introduction à la nouvelle bactériologic. Montreal: Presses de

l'Université de Montréal.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 415

Chapter 18: For a Crisiology1

Translation by Thierry C. Pauchant

Introduction
The notion of crisis has been extended during the XXth century to touch upon all horizons of

contemporary knowledge. There is no domain or problem that is not haunted by the idea of

crisis: capitalism, society, couple, family, values, youth, science, law, civilization, humanity.

But this notion, by being generalized, has been somehow emptied from the inside.

Originally, Krisis meant decision: in the evolution of an uncertain process, it was the decisive

moment which allowed a diagnosis. Today crisis means lack of decision. It is the moment out of

which spring uncertainties as well as disruption. When the concept of crisis was limited to the

economic sector, one could at least recognize it by some quantifiable characteristics: decreases

(of production, consumption, etc.); increases (of unemployment, bankruptcies, etc.). But as soon

as it was expanded to the cultural domain, to civilization, to humanity, the notion lost all

boundaries. Using the term merely allows one to say that something is wrong. But that

information is provided at the cost of a general obscuring of the notion of crisis. The term is now

used for naming that which cannot be named. It refers to a double hole: a hole in our knowledge

(at the very heart of the word crisis); and a hole in the actual social reality where the "crisis"

appears.

The word crisis has spread everywhere, invading all social matters, all notions. But, for

the concept to regain its meaning, we must pursue to the very end the operation of "crisification"

and, most importantly, we must put a stop to the idea that the concept of crisis is in crisis. The

key problem is how to clarify the concept of crisis, how to make it enlightening (knowing, of

course, that all clarification brings its own shadow, that all explanation has its own blind spot).
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 416

First of all, in which domain should we consider the notion of crisis? As we all know, the

term was first applied to the world of biological organisms, and indeed it can effectively be

applied to them. But the concept of crisis is a notion that manifests its full richness within the

framework of socio-historical developments. This does not mean that we should consider the

anthropo-socio-economical domain as a closed one. On the contrary, and I arrive here at what is

for me the first principle of all crisiology: one can only build a theory of social, historical and

anthropological crises if one has a theory of society which is itself systemic, cybernetic and bio-

negentropic.

Indeed, if one wishes, in order to conceive the notion of crisis, to go beyond the notions

of disruption, struggle or disequilibrium, one must conceive of society as a system that can

experience crises. This implies that one posits three levels of existence: 1) the systemic level, 2)

the cybernetic level, and 3) the negentropic level. Otherwise, the theory of society would be

insufficient and the notion of crisis inconceivable.

The Anti-or-organizational Principle of Organization

1) First there is the systemic principle: that which belongs to each system, whatever it is. The

concept of system, an arrangement organized by the interaction of its parts, must necessarily call

for the idea of antagonism. All interactions among elements, objects and beings suppose the

existence and the interplay of attractions, affinities and possibilities of connection. But if there

were not any force of exclusion, repulsion or dissociation, everything would be gathered together

in confusion, and no system would be conceivable. For a system to exist at all there must be a

maintaining of difference. That is, forces must be maintained which save at least something of

the fundamental in the original of the elements, objects or interrelations. Therefore, the

maintaining must be counter-balanced, neutralized or actualized by forces of exclusion or

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 417

repulsion. As excellently expressed by Lupasco: "In order for a system to form itself and exist,

the parts of all organizations, either due to their nature or to the laws that govern them, must be

susceptible of gathering themselves closer and at the same time of excluding each other, of

attracting each other and at the same time of pushing each other away, of associating and of

dissociating themselves, of integrating and of disintegrating themselves" (1962, p. 332).

So, each interrelationship both requires and actualizes a principle of complementarity and

a principle of antagonism. For example, in an atomic nucleus, the electrical repulsions among

protons stay at a neutralized state, overcome by the interactions referred to as the strong force,

which include the presence of neutrons. The interrelationships among atoms in the molecule are

stabilized by the equilibrium which is maintained through positive and negative polarity. Thus

the most stable interrelationship supposes that antagonistic forces be both maintained and

neutralized. At the heart of the difference of thermodynamic equilibria of homogenization and of

disorder are the organizational equilibria which are balances of antagonistic forces. Every

relation, every organization, every system consists of and produces some antagonism.

The antagonism of forces that are supposed to exist within each interrelationship is joined

and superimposed by other antagonisms (latent or effective, potential or actual) which the

systemic organization produces. The system, by establishing the integration of the parts to the

whole through multiple complementarities (of parts among themselves and of the whole to the

parts) institutes some constraints, inhibitions and repressions. It also institutes the domination of

the whole over the parts, of the organization over the organized. These constraints and

dominations subjugate and update forces and proprieties which, if they were objectified, would

be antagonistic to other parts, to the interrelations, to the organization, to the system as a whole.

Therefore, there exists a latent antagonism between what is actual and what is potential. What is
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 418

actual, in strictly physico-chemical systems, is complementary, associative and organizational.

What is potential is dis-organizational and dis-integrative. Thus, we could posit here the

following systemic principle: the complex unity of a system creates and repulses an

antagonism.

The latent or virtual antagonism among the connected parts, as well as between the parts

and the whole, is the other side of the clearly evident solidarity of the system. We can thus

similarly formulate the following principle: the systemic complementarities are NOT dissociable

from antagonisms. These antagonisms remain either virtual, or more or less controlled, or even,

as we shall see later, more or less controlling. They emerge when a crisis emerges, and they

generate the crisis when they erupt. In living systems, the complementarities are unstable and

oscillate, as well as the antagonisms do, from updating to potentiality and from potentiality to

updating. In ecosystems and the social systems of mammals, including human systems, the

relationships among complementarities, competitions and antagonisms, complexify themselves.

The same relationships can, in their ambiguity, be at the same time complementary, competitive

and antagonistic. Within these systems, as we shall see, a process of disorganization or dis-

integration is at the same time complementary, competitive and antagonistic to the action of life's

permanent re-organization.

Insert Figure 47

2) The cybernetic level. When we consider systems of cybernetic complexity (such as the

machine, the cell or society, that is systems exhibiting regulatory retroactions), we notice that the

organization itself triggers and utilizes some antagonistic behaviors from certain parts. This is to

say: there also exists an organizational antagonism.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 419

Indeed, the feedback (which regulates the functioning of a machine or which maintains

the smooth and stable functioning of a system) is called "negative feedback”, a very explicit

term. Triggered by the variation of a part, this feedback attempts to annul this variation. Thus the

regulation results from the antagonistic action of one or several parts on one or several other

parts, as soon as the latter vary above a threshold and threaten the stability, the status quo, of the

system's integrity. The negative feedback is thus organizationally antagonistic to another (anti-

organizational) antagonism, threatening the system's integrity in the process of being actualized.

This feedback reinstalls the complementarity between the parts. Thus, the regulation maintains

the general complementarity by means of a partial and local anti-antagonistic action. There is

therefore, at the cybernetic level, an ambivalent relationship between complementarity and

antagonism. This relationship is by nature organizational. The complementarity acts in an

antagonistic way against the antagonism and the antagonism acts in a complementary way

against the complementarity. The regulation or the control opposes the virtual antagonisms

which, endlessly in such systems, begin to update themselves. Thus, the antagonism does not

only carry in itself the dislocation of the system, but it can also contribute to its stability and its

regularity.

To summarize: we have seen antagonism at different levels:

 At the level of interrelationships, which implies and neutralizes antagonisms;

 At the level of the organizational constraints and of the feedback of the whole on the

parts, which creates and repulses antagonistic forces;

 At the level of the use of the organization of antagonistic processes and actions.

3) The negentropic level (the organizational/anti-organizational antagonism). One cannot

conceive of an organization without antagonism. But this antagonism carries potentially in itself,
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 420

and sooner or later inevitably, the system's ruin and disintegration. This is one of the angles from

which we can consider the second thermodynamic principle. Each interaction, each organization

maintains itself by immobilizing (in a rigid and static system) or by mobilizing (in a dynamic

system) energies of relationship. These energies allow the compensation and control of the forces

of opposition and dissociation, that is, tendencies toward dispersion. The increase of entropy

corresponds to an energetic/organizational degradation which frees the antagonisms and leads to

disintegration and dispersion. No system, even the most static, the most stuck, the most closed,

can avoid this disintegration. To say it another way, each system bears in itself its own potential

disintegration as it carries within itself the forces of antagonism. The second thermodynamic

principle condemns any system, in the long run, to dispersion, which means that each system is

condemned to die. The only possibility of fighting against disintegration is: a) to integrate and, as

much as possible, to use antagonisms in an integrative way; b) to renew energy and organization

by drawing them from the environment (open system); c) to be able to multiply oneself in a way

that the rate of reproduction is greater than the rate of degradation; d) to be able to reorganize

oneself and defend oneself.

This is the case of living systems. Life has integrated within itself its own antagonism to

such an extent that, constantly and necessarily, it contains death within itself.

To summarize: the existence of all systems necessarily carries within itself some

antagonisms which necessarily bear within themselves the potential and announcement of the

system's "death".

The disintegrative potential is the measure of the force of disintegration that binds

physical systems. Where there is the strongest interaction—the hydrogen nucleus—is where the

greatest force of disintegration is (the H bomb).

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 421

In cybernetic systems, the disorganizational and the organizational potentials are the two

faces of the Janus concept of feedback. Where there is negative feedback, there is the potential of

positive feedback, i.e. of a deviance which amplifies itself by feeding on its own development.

Thus, if nothing inhibits or cancels it, the positive feedback propagates itself within the entire

system, becomes runaway, that is, a disintegrative rush. To each potentiality of higher

organization corresponds new possibilities of dis-organization. The strictly physical systems

persist without living: they disintegrate without dying; they are half-alive or merely half-dead.

Only the most complex form of living organization corresponds to beings that undergo the

completion of death.

But, as I have shown, the highest forms of organization, the forms of living systems,

trigger (by energy consumption and random activities) the processes of disorganization

(disorders which wake the antagonisms, antagonisms which trigger disorders). But they also

integrate them (without ceasing to be disintegrators), use them and obtain nourishment from

them (for and by their permanent activities of reorganization). I have shown elsewhere (Morin,

1975) that the competitive and antagonistic relations are paramount in the very constitution of

eco-systems.

We can thus formulate the following principle: no organization exists that is free from

anti-organization, (even in a potential way). For the machine, it is the positive feedback. For the

living being, it is the permanent disorganization. We can say reciprocally: anti-organization is

altogether necessary and antagonistic to the organization.

The Problem of Antagonism

The principle "no organization without anti-organization" shows that antagonism and

complementarity are two poles of the same complex reality. Antagonism, above a threshold of
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 422

value and processes, becomes dis-organizational. But, even after having become

disorganizational, it can constitute the condition of transformative reorganization.

The systemic principle of antagonism becomes more and more active and troublesome

when we move up to the complexity of living systems. The principle is no longer only frozen or

static; it is linked to the living dynamism of internal and external interactions/retroactions. The

richer the living complexity is, the more the relationship between antagonism/complementarity

becomes shifting and unstable; and the more that relationship triggers some "crises" phenomena.

These crises are dis-organizational, by reason of the transformation of the differences in

opposition or of the complementarities in antagonisms, but they can also trigger some

evolutionary reorganizations.

The Theoretical Complexity of Crises

We have gone through the systemic level, the cybernetic level (regulation, homeostasis), and the

negentropic level (permanent reorganization, development of complexity) of historic-social

phenomena.

1) Already in the first level (that is, the systemic level), there is complexity. What do we mean

by this? The term does not limit its meaning here only to empirical complication in the

interactions and interrelations. It means that the interrelations and interactions bear within

themselves a principle of theoretical and logical complexity. Thus we need to consider together

the concepts of organization and disorganization, and of complementarity and antagonism,

instead of splitting them apart and purely and simply opposing them. We argue that complexity

is what constrains us to bring together notions which apparently should exclude each other, in an

altogether complementary, competitive and antagonistic way. Every organization, i.e. every

system, bears within itself this complexity as the internal relations among the parts, and between
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 423

the whole and the parts, are at the same time complementary, competitive (virtually or explicitly)

and antagonistic (virtually for the systems we call "closed", that is having no energetic/material

exchanges with the external world, and explicitly in the other systems).

It is in historical societies that the relationship of the

complementarity/competition/antagonism problem gets fully developed between organization

and anti-organization. The modern social systems are weakly integrated (some even claim, that

they are not systems as such, but mutually interfering entanglements of systems), and the

relations among individuals, communities, classes, parties, and ethnic groups oscillate in various

ways between complementary and antagonistic activities.1 This is the first level where the

concept of crisis can draw some nourishment.

2) At the second level, which is cybernetic (and which is the distinctive level, for example, of

historical societies, and of very modern systems) the problem is formed by diverse

entanglements, by mutual regulations, and by using the antagonisms themselves. In such

societies some positive feedback (such as economic growth) becomes a social regulator

(diminishing tensions within society), while the remaining positive feedbacks at multiple levels

develop some sources of disorders, that is, some crises. For example, economic growth triggers

new needs, creates new tensions, and revives old ones. It creates the conditions of crises and

conflicts for the ownership of energy resources, which create the conditions for ecological crises.

Thus, we have a second level which nourishes the concept of crisis: the cybernetic level

of multiple homeostasis, the complex interplay among positive feedback (growth factors,

transforming the deviances in counter-trends, trends, then finally in new organizational nuclei)

and negative feedback. And so, every increase in an oscillation or a fluctuation, every freeze or
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 424

delay, every insufficiency in a regulation, can become a factor of crisis, and can lead to a chain

of destructuring.

3) At the third level, the negentropic level, the central problem is the one posed by permanent

reorganization, itself linked to permanent disorganization, that is, to the necessary presence,

equally vital and mortal (thus complex), of the disorder within negentropic organizations. Such

systems can only survive and develop with and by their exchanges with the environment (in raw

material and energy, but also in organization and information). They depend on the environment

for their relative autonomy (again, a characteristic of complexity). In this dependency they are

subject to ecological variations and phenomenal disturbances originating in the external world.

Thus they bear in themselves disorder and hazard, which they produce (from the consumption of

energy which increases entropy) and receive from the external world.

Such systems can evidently survive. They push back disorder. They can integrate

disorder. They use disorder only by an auto-referential principle of organization which has a

generative function (the "genetic code" inscribed in the DNA of living individuals, the system of

socio-cultural rules, norms, knowledge and know-how of a society) and a phenomenal function.

This is the reason why I argue that such systems are auto (geno-pheno)-eco-reorganizing.

However, such systems are the ones where the complex phenomena called crises arise

from the internal and external hazards/disorders and, most of all, from their interferences. Thus

appears the third level of complexity which not only nourishes but also allows the emergence of

the concept of crisis.

Such is the necessary, but not sufficient, minimum without which the theory of society

would not only be simplistic, but also unreal, and without which there cannot be a theory of

crisis.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 425

The Components of the Concept of Crisis

The concept of crisis, as all systemic concepts, is in fact constituted by a constellation of

interrelated notions.

1) The idea of disruption

The idea of disruption is the first one to be revealed by the concept of crisis. This idea has in fact

two faces. First, it refers to the event, the accident, the external disruption which triggers the

crisis. According to this meaning, the possible triggers of the crisis can be very diverse: poor

harvest, invasion followed by defeat, etc. And second, the most interesting disruptions are not the

ones that originate crises but the ones emerging from apparently nondisruptive processes. Often,

these processes emerge as a too-large or too-rapid increase of a value or of a variable as

compared to others: "excessive" growth of a population compared to the resources in a given

environment (and, as often in animal ecology, it is the crossing of a given threshold in

demographic density, before the scarcity of resources triggers "crisical" disruptions of

behaviors); or, as it is called in classical economics, the excessive increase of supply in relation

to demand.

When we consider these types of processes in systemic terms, we see that the quantitative

increase creates a case of overloading: the system becomes unable to resolve the problems that it

had resolved below certain thresholds. The system should be able to transform itself, but it

cannot conceive such a transformation or implement it. Alternately, the crisis can also be

triggered by a double-bind situation, i.e. double jamming, where the system, stuck between two

contrary requirements, is paralyzed, disturbed and deregulated.

More broadly, the crisis eruption can be viewed as a consequence of overloading or

double-bind, where the system is confronted with a problem that it cannot resolve within the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 426

rules and norms of its functioning and within the terms of its normal existence. Thus, the crisis

appears as an absence of solution (phenomena of deregulation and disorganization) which can

then trigger a solution (new regulation, evolutive transformation).

It is clear, then, that what is important for the concept of crisis is not so much the external

disruption which in certain cases effectively triggers a crisis process. Rather, it is the internal

disruption from processes apparently not disruptive. And the internal disruption, triggered by

overloading or double-bind, will manifest itself as regulation failure or the decay of homeostasis,

i.e. as deregulation. The crisis is at the level of the organizational rules of a system, at the level,

not only of the external phenomenal events in which the system is ecologically embedded, but of

the crisis's organization itself, in its generative and regenerative function.

The organizational deregulation will thus translate into dysfunction where there was

functionalism, break where there was continuity, positive feedback where there was negative

feedback, conflict where there was complementarity.

2) The increase of disorder and uncertainty

Every living system, and especially every social system, carries disorder within itself. These

systems function in spite of this disorder, because of this disorder and with this disorder, which

means that a part of the disorder is inhibited, emptied out, corrected, transmuted, integrated.

However, a crisis is always a regression of determinism, of stabilities and internal

constraints within a system. A crisis, thus, is always a progression of disorders, instabilities and

hazards.

This leads to a progression of uncertainties. The regression of determinism brings a

regression of prediction. The whole system affected by the crisis enters into a random phase

where the forms that its immediate future will take are uncertain. Of course, a new forecast, at a
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 427

second instance, is possible in some conditions. Thus, for example, if we suppose that a given

society enters a period of economic-political cumulative "disorders", while the possibility of a

day-to-day forecast considerably diminishes, it is, however, foreseeable that an authoritarian

solution will emerge, a solution that we can predict by studying the equilibrium of forces and

strategy in that society and its environment.

3) Freeze/unfreezing
What is astonishing is that the flood of disorders is associated with the paralysis and progressive

rigidity of what constituted the organizational flexibility of the system, its mechanisms of

response, of strategy and regulation. Everything happens as if the crisis announced two kinds of

death which, when combined effectively, constitute the death of negentropic systems. On the one

hand there is the breaking down, i.e. the dispersion and the return to disorder of the constitutive

elements; and, on the other, there is the corpse's rigidity, i.e. the return to mechanistic forms and

casualities.

The second aspect of rigidity manifests itself by the freezing of what, indeed, assured the

system's permanent reorganization, i.e. the locking of the negative feedback mechanisms which

cancelled the deviances and disturbances.

However, this freezing OF the permanent reorganization mechanisms also triggers or

allows the unfreezing of potentialities or inhibited realities. Indeed, the organizational freezing

corresponds to a lifting of the constraints affecting the system's parts and processes.

To say it again, the central characteristic of a crisis is not only in the explosion, the

outburst of disorder and uncertainty; it is in the disruption/freezing affecting the process of

organization/reorganization. It is in the disruption, the deregulation. And the "deeper" the crisis
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 428

is (e.g. crisis of "civilization"); the more we need to search for the knot of the crisis in something

deep and hidden from the interplay of the regulation's mechanisms.

The "unfreezing" of a crisis becomes manifest under various aspects, inseparable from

each other. We will enumerate them here without suggesting that this enumeration is in anyway

hierarchical.

3.1) Development of Positive Feedback

The disruptions caused by a crisis trigger forces which aggravate the fluctuations instead of

correcting them. Positive feedback is the retroactive process from which the deviation becomes

more and more pronounced and increases instead of being cancelled. The development of

positive feedback is expressed by: a) the rapid transformation of a deviance into an antagonism

or counter-tendency; b) an excessive or disproportionate phenomenon of growth or decay of a

particular component or factor; c) rapid process, characterized by this excessiveness (ubris),

which can eventually promote a breathtaking disintegration which feeds on itself.

From this perspective, the time of a crisis is a time of acceleration, amplification,

contagious propagation and morphogenesis (the constitution and development of new forms

from deviances).

3.2) Transformation of Complementarities in Competitions and Antagonisms

In these processes, the virtual antagonisms have the tendency to become manifest, while the

manifest complementary parts have the tendency to GATHER STRENGTH. These processes

are visible among individuals, groups and classes. They are complex. In them there is an

interplay, simultaneously and diversely, of "every man for himself", "every man for us all", and

"everybody against everybody", with alliances and coalitions as temporary and random as the

crisis is deep.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 429

3.3) Increase and Appearance of Polemic

All of what we have said above clearly shows that the latent or virtual antagonistic

characteristics embedded in each organization become manifest and break out, specifically in all

negentropic organizations. This is even more so for all emerging socio-historical organizations

which actualize themselves. Conflictive traits exhibit the tendency to increase everywhere, even

to the point of becoming dominant (for example, a crisis can result in civil war, or transform

itself into a war against someone else).

This is to say that a theory in crisiology could provide the researcher with a guide for

uncovering the components of a crisis but not a "technique" for its analysis. Every crisis requires

the concrete study of its own complexity. Conflicts multiply not only among individuals, groups,

and classes, but also among the control/ regulation mechanisms and the deviant/neo-tendentious

processes. We can see here easily that the idea of crisis cannot be reduced to the idea of internal

conflict within a system, but that it bears in itself the potential for the multiplying, deepening and

triggering conflicts.

4) Unfreezing/Refreezing: The Multiplication of Double-Binds

Double-binds multiply at the level of control and power authorities. The power in place can

neither tolerate nor decrease the outbursts of disorder, deviance and antagonism. But the

individuals or groups who participate in the crisis can themselves reach a threshold above which

the satisfaction of their requirements risk, leading to the destruction of their demand. The

power/control mechanisms are not the only ones which confront these double-binds. The claim-

makers confront them too, as their strategies of action must, in the uncertainty and risk of the

crisis's development, confront "contradictions".2

5) The Increase of Research Activities

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 430

The more the crisis deepens and lasts, the more it will demand a search for more and more

radical and drastic solutions. Thus, a crisis always involves a wake-up characteristic. It

challenges what seemed evident, what seemed functional and efficient. It reveals some

shortcomings and vices at their minimal expression. This characteristic of a crisis motivates the

release of a research effort that could lead to a technological device, an innovation, a new legal

or political formula. Such innovation leads to a reformation of the system and, henceforth,

becomes a real part of the reorganizational mechanisms and strategies of the system. The search

can go beyond the reform and lead to a restructuring, a "revolution", as we say. It is capable of

constituting on new bases, perhaps within a greater level of complexity, a "meta-system" that can

go beyond the fundamental double-binds, revealing the limits and shortcomings of the previous

system. There is thus in every crisis an unfreezing of intellectual activities, in the formulation of

a diagnosis, in the correction of too incomplete or too dubious knowledge, in the disputing of an

established or sacred order, in innovation and creation.

There is then, in a deepening crisis, at once a destruction in action (a virulent setting in

motion of the forces of disorder, dislocation and disintegration), and a growing creative activity.

The crisis liberates at the same time forces of death and of regeneration. There lies its radical

ambiguity.

6) Mythical and Imaginary Solutions

But the ambiguity also appears on another level, within the same process of research. The search

for a solution acquires some magical, mythical and ritualistic traits. The critical intellectual

activities increase alongside the magical processes. One tries to isolate, to define culpability and

to immolate, eliminate the evil by sacrificing the "guilty" one or the "guilty" ones. The search for

responsibility is thus separated into two antagonistic branches: the branch that attempts to know
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 431

the nature of the problem itself, and the branch that attempts to find the scapegoat to be

immolated. And, of course, there is a multiplication of imaginary "guilty ones", consisting of the

most marginal individuals or members of a minority.

One must eliminate them as foreign entities and/or destroy them as infectious agents. In

these cases, the search for solutions leads to and deviates towards the ritualistic sacrifice. At the

same time, the unrest, calamities, perils of the crisis give rise, as in a counterforce, to great hopes

of better future, of final and radical solutions, and to absolute hope. The messianism of salvation

blows up, amplifies and deploys in the crisis the mythological dimension already present in all

human affairs.

7) The Dialectic of All These Components

I have here, in an abstract fashion, relatively isolated some of the components of a crisis.

However it is very clear that the crisis is not only the sum of all of these components, but also

their interactions, their combinations, and at the same time the complementary, competitive and

antagonistic interplay of these processes and phenomena interacting in a dialectic fashion.

A crisis is at the same time, the freezing and unfreezing, the play of negative and positive

feedbacks, the antagonisms and solidarities, the double-binds, the practical and magical searches

and the solutions generated at physical and mythological levels.

The concept of crisis is thus extremely rich. Richer than the idea of disturbance. Richer

than the idea of disorder. Carrying in itself disturbances, disorders, deviances and antagonisms.

The concept also stimulates within itself forces of life and forces of death which become, here

again, and even more here than elsewhere, the two faces of the same phenomenon. In a crisis, the

“quasi-neurotic" processes (magical, ritualistic, mythological) and the inventive and creative

processes are simultaneously stimulated. All these get tangled-up, muddled-up, combating each
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 432

other, combining with each other. And the development, the issue of the crisis, is random not

only because there is progression of disorder, but because all these forces, processes and

extremely rich phenomena inter-influence each other and inter-destruct each other in a disorderly

process.

Crisis and Transformation

1) Of Action
A crisis triggers disorderly processes that can become wild. In these conditions, any action based

on forecast and the implementation of determinism, is almost suffocated. But, under another

perspective, action is itself stimulated. In normal situations, the predominance of determinism

and of regularities only allows action within extremely narrow margins, and in the direction of

these determinisms and regularities. To the contrary, a crisis creates new conditions for action. In

the same way that military strategy can develop only in the random framework of the fighting, in

the same way every random situation allows audacious coups in strategic games, including

political games. The crisis situation, because of its uncertainties and randomness, because of the

mobility of the forces and forms within it, because of the multiplication of the alternatives,

creates favorable situations for the development of audacious and innovative strategies. It allows

for decisions between diverse possible behaviors or strategies. Decisions, taken on the spur of the

moment, covering everything or nothing, taken by a very restricted number of individuals, even,

perhaps by only one (alea jacta est – the die is cast), can lead to irreversible and unpredictable

consequences for the entire process. From this perspective also, the crisis is dependant on

randomness. It is possible, at some of its intersecting moments, for a minority or for one

individual to influence the development so that it will develop in a sometimes extremely

improbable direction. The increase of the role of individual action and the growth of randomness

go hand in hand. They are two faces of the same phenomenon.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 433

2) Change: Progression/Regression
A crisis bears within itself, for historical societies, not only the potential for a return to the status

quo ante (by absorption of the disruption), not only the potential for disintegration of the system

as such (a society can split or crumble), not only the possibility of total disintegration (a

historical society is practically immortal, and only genocide or a deadly attack to its eco-system

can radically disintegrate it), but also –and most of all— infinite possibilities for change. These

changes can be local or minor. But they can also bring about transformations at the heart of the

social organization itself. The most profound changes affect the generative organization of the

society, that which continuously regenerates phenomenal organization (which we call, by a

vulgar idiom of the social sciences, the "structure").

The uncertain and ambiguous character of crises makes their resolution uncertain. As a

crisis carries the joint outburst of disintegrative and integrative forces (of "death" and of "life"),

as it triggers some "healthy" processes (research, strategy, innovation) and "pathological"

processes (myth, magic, ritual), as it acts as a wake-up call and a sleeping pill at the same time,

the crisis can have a regressive or progressive resolution.

In the regressive resolution the system loses some degree of complexity and flexibility.

The regression is expressed most often by the loss of the system's richest qualities, its freedoms,

which are at the same time its most fragile and recently acquired traits, and by the consolidation

of its most primitive or rigid structures.3

In the progressive resolution the system gains some new qualities and properties, i.e. a

greater complexity.

Here we can clearly see the double face of a crisis: risk and opportunity; risk of

regression and opportunity for progression. Because it is the crisis that updates the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 434

disorganization and the reorganization (and necessarily the one alongside the other). Every

increased disorganization carries effectively within itself the risk of death, but also the

opportunity for a new organization, a creation, an improvement. As McLuhan put it:

"…breakdown is a potential breakthrough". The double-bind that freezes the system is, at the

same time, the generating process of a meta-system which will resolve the insurmountable

contradictions and destructive antagonisms of the first system, but which will not prevent the

resulting new system from exhibiting its own antagonisms and contradictions.

In historical societies, we often find that a crisis can evolve simultaneously towards a

progressive and a regressive solution, depending on its levels. Some economic progresses can

correspond to some political regressions and vice versa.

3) Crisis Theory and Evolution Theory

A crisis is not necessarily evolutionary. It can resorb itself and return to the status quo. But a

crisis is potentially evolutionary. It bears within itself, in the state of pregnancy, the germ of

evolution. To understand this, one must abandon, once and for all, the idea that evolution is a

continuous process, like a river. Every evolution is brought to life by a number of

events/accidents or disruptions, which give birth to a deviance, become a trend, develop some

antagonisms within the system, trigger some disorganizations/reorganizations that can be more

or less dramatic or profound. Evolution can thus only be considered as a string of quasi-critical

disorganizations/reorganizations.

A crisis is thus a microcosm of evolution. It is a sort of laboratory for studying

evolutionary processes in vitro.

We live in societies that are in permanent and rapid evolution and whose complexity is

such that this evolution is mixed with many instabilities and disorders. Thus, today we do not
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 435

know if, at any particular moment in time, a given permanent evolution is not also a given

permanent crisis. But, in saying this, we can differentiate the two concepts, that is, "evolution"

and "crisis", from one another, since a crisis, by definition, is not permanent. A crisis develops

within temporal boundaries. A relatively normal “before” and “after” must necessarily exist. A

crisis stricto sensu is always defined in comparison to times of relative stability. Otherwise, the

notion of crisis would be engulfed in the notion of evolution. Thus, as the concept of evolution

has, however, an aspect of crisis, we can say that every evolution exhibits a component of crisis,

and can be conceived as an irreversible string of crises.

Toward a Crisiology?
We believe in the possibility and usefulness of a crisiology. It should include a quasi-clinical

observational method, itself linked to a deontology. The "crisis centers" should not only be

medical, they could be extended to all domains. For example, culture centers should become

crisis centers, and not offices of entertainment. Thus the method of observation/intervention

must be linked to a theory. To say it again: there cannot be any crisis theory without a theory of

auto-(geno-pheno)-eco-re-organization.

I hope that I have shown that we can elevate the concept of crisis to the level of a rich and

complex macro-concept, conveying a constellation of more specific concepts. The fact that we

must bring the concept of uncertainty, of randomness, of ambiguity into the concept of crisis,

doesn’t involve a theoretical regression, but, rather, wherever uncertainty and ambiguity have

penetrated, a regression of simplistic knowledge and theory, which allows the development of

complex knowledge and theory.

In fact, we can better understand the intuitions of Marx and Freud –i.e. that a crisis is at

once a revealing and an effecting event. . Indeed, we can see better how a crisis reveals what was
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 436

hidden, latent and virtual within a given society (or individual): the fundamental antagonisms,

the underground seismic faults, the hidden progression of new realities. At the same time, a crisis

helps us comprehend theoretically the immersed part of the social organization, its survival and

transformative capacities.

And it is on this point that a crisis is something of an effector. It triggers, even if only for

one moment, even if only in a pregnant state, everything that can bring about change,

transformation, evolution.

It is stranger that the concept of crisis, as it becomes more and more an intuitively evident

reality, is being more and more frequently used in multiple ways, and consequently remains a

vulgar and empty word; instead of waking us up, it lulls us to sleep (the term " crisis of

civilization " has in this way become completely soporific, while it actually reveals a worrisome

reality). This diagnostic term has lost all its virtue as a diagnosis. Today we must deepen the

crisis of conscience for the consciousness of a crisis to, at last, emerge. The crisis of the concept

of crisis is the point of departure for a theory of crisis.

Notes
1. This article was published in French under the title “Pour une crisiologie” in

Communications, Vol. 25, 1976, pp. 149-163 and in English under the title “For a

crisisology” in Industrial & Environmental Crisis Quarterly, Vol. 7, 1991, pp. 5-22.

2. Authoritarian states, especially in their totalitarian variant, attempt without end to

annihilate antagonists and disorder (by repression, concentration camps, killing

physically those who bring about antagonism and disorder) instead of using their

organizational potentialities in the direction of complexity.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 437

The link between crisis and double-bind can be apprehended in a simplified way from two

examples, one taken strictly from cybernetics, another from biology. The first one concerns Grey

Walter’s electronic turtle, whose behavior becomes “neurotic”, i.e. incoherent or immobilized,

within contradictory, quasi-conditioned reflexes. The second concerns the experiences where one

has subjected an animal to a “double bind”. Let’s take an experiment done on a cat. Let a blast of

hot air (which the cat hates) be associated with an offering of food (which the cat desires). After

some time the double offering triggers the phenomenon of anxiety; psychosomatic disorders,

sexual aberrations, inhibitions, aversions, phobias, suspicions, battles against an imaginary

adversary, ritualistic behaviors, etc. The example not only allows one to see the multiple and

multidimensional character of the sequential deregulation, that is the variety of a crisis’s effect. It

also allows one to see forms of classical answers to a crisis, that is, ritualistic or mythical

behaviors (such as battles against an imaginary enemy).

Thus, in the regressive solution, one will physically eliminate the deviances, even the potential

ones; one will attack the roots of all possibilities of critical or antagonistic tendencies; one will

denounce and punish the guilty; or one will solve the problems through litanies, rhetoric, and

ritualistic ceremonies.

References
Lupasco, S. 1962. L’energie et la matiäre vivante. Paris: Editions Julliard.

Morin, E. 1975. L’esprit du temps, Tome 2. Paris: Grasset.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 438

Chapter 19: Commandments of Complexity

Translation by Alfonso Montuori

“Classical” science was founded on the idea that the complexity of the phenomenal world could

and should be resolved starting from simple principles and general laws. From this perspective,

complexity was the appearance of reality, but simplicity was its very nature.

In fact, it was a paradigm of simplification characterized at once by a principle of

generality, a principle of reduction, and a principle of disjunction, which governed the

intelligibility of classical scientific knowledge. This principle turned out to be extraordinarily

productive in the progress of the Newtonian physics of gravitation and Einsteinian relativity, and

the biological “reductionism” that has allowed us to conceive of the physico-chemical nature of

all living organization.

But today, the progress of physics itself leads us to consider the insurmountable

complexities of the subatomic particle and of cosmic reality, and the progress of biology itself

opens up inseparable problems of autonomy and dependence that concern all life. Suddenly, the

development of scientific knowledge creates a crisis in the very scientific foundation that

generated these developments.

On this basis, we should ask ourselves if a reflection on the advances in diverse sciences,

both natural and human, should not allow us initiate the conditions and characteristics of a

“paradigm of complexity.”

Very slowly we have been able to create a categorization (undoubtedly not definitive) of

the governing/controlling principles of intelligibility in classical scientific knowledge, and, in

contrast, an outline of the principles governing/controlling complex intelligibility.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 439

I am calling the paradigm of simplification the interconnected collection of principles of

intelligibility of classical science, which produce a simplifying conception of the universe

(physical, biological, and anthropo-social). I am calling the paradigm of complexity the

interconnected collection of principles of intelligibility which could determine the conditions for

a complex vision of the universe (physical, biological, anthropo-social).

I. Paradigm of simplification (principles of intelligibility of classical science)

A. Principle of universality: “there is no science but of the general.” Expulsion of the

local and singular as contingent or residual.

B. Elimination of temporal irreversibility, and more generally, of all that was

historical or pertaining to specific events.

C. The reduction of the knowledge of wholes or systems to the knowledge of simple

parts or elementary constitutive units.

D. The reduction of the knowledge of organization to the principles of order (laws,

invariants, constants) inherent in organizations.

E. The principle of linear causality, superior and exterior to objects.

F. Absolute explanatory supremacy of order, in other words, a universal and

impeccable determinism. Apparently random events only appear to be so due to

our ignorance. Hence, based on principles 1, 3,4, 5 and 6, the intelligibility of a

phenomenon or complex object is reduced to the necessary and general laws that

govern the elementary units that constitute it.

G. The principle of isolation/disjunction of the object from its environment.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 440

H. Principle of absolute disjunction between object and the subject that

perceives/knows it. Verification by observers/experimenters is sufficient, not only

to achieve objectivity, but to exclude the knowing subject.

I. Ergo: the elimination of the entire problem of the subject in scientific knowledge.

J. The elimination of being and existence through quantification and formalisation.

K. Autonomy is not conceivable.

L. Principle of the absolute faith in logic to establish the intrinsic truth of theories.

All contradiction necessarily appears as error.

M. Thinking occurs by inscribing clear and distinct ideas in a monological discourse.

II. Towards a paradigm of complexity

As yet there is clearly no “paradigm of complexity.” But what appears here and

there, in the sciences, is the problem of complexity, based on the awareness of the

difficulties created by what was eliminated from the conception classical science; this

problematization should animate research regarding what modes of intelligibility are

appropriate at this juncture. My hypothesis is that a paradigm of complexity could be

constituted by and through the conjunction of the following principles of

intelligibility:

A. The validity but insufficiency of the principle of universality. Complementary and

inseparable principle of intelligibility starting with the local and the singular.

B. The principle of the recognition and re-integration of temporal irreversibility in

physics (Second Principle of Thermodynamics, thermodynamics of irreversible

phenomena), in biology (ontogenesis, phylogenesis, evolution), and in all

organizational matters (“one can only understand a complex system by referring

Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 441

to its history and its trajectory,” Prigogine). Introduction of history and events as

ineluctable necessities in any description and explanation.

C. Recognition of the impossibility of isolating elementary simple units at the basis

of the physical universe. The principle connecting the necessity of connecting the

knowledge of elements or parts to that of the wholes or systems they constitute. “I

find it impossible to know the parts without knowing the whole, or to know the

whole without knowing the parts.” (Pascal)

D. The principle of the unavoidability of the problem of organization and, as regards

physical beings (stars), biological beings and anthropo-social entities, of self-

organization.

E. The principle of complex causality, including complex mutual causality

(Maruyama), inter-retro-actions, delays, slips, synergies, derailments, re-

orientations. Principle of endo-exo-causality in the case of self-organizing

phenomena.

F. The principle of a dialogical order-disorder-interactions-organization in all

phenomena. Integration, therefore, not only of the problem of organization, but

also of random events in the search for intelligibility.

G. The principle of distinction but not disjunction of object or being and its

environment. Knowledge of all physical organization recalls the knowledge of its

interactions with the environment. Knowledge of all biological organization

recalls knowledge of its interactions with its eco-system.

H. Principle of relation between observer/conceptualizer and the object that is

observed/conceived.
Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 442

I. The possibility and necessity of a scientific theory of the subject.

J. The possibility, starting with a theory of self-production and self-organization, of

introducing and recognizing physically and biologically (and even more so,

anthropologically) the categories of being and existence.

K. The possibility, starting with a theory of self-production and self-organization, of

recognizing scientifically a theory of autonomy.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 443

Section II: Sociology of the Present

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 444

Chapter 20: Chronicle of a Film1

In December 1959, Jean Rouch and I were jurors together at the first international festival of

ethnographic film in Florence. Upon my return, I wrote an article which appeared in January

1960, in France Observateur, entitled "For a New Cinéma-Vérité." I quote it here because it so

clearly conveys the intentions that pushed me to propose to Rouch that he make a film, not in

Africa this time, but in France.

For a New Cinéma-Vérité

At this first ethnographic and sociological festival of Florence, the Festival di Popoli, I got the

impression that a new cinéma-vérité was possible. I am referring to the so-called documentary

film and not to fictional film. Of course, it is through fictional films that the cinema has attained

and continues to attain its most profound truths: truths about the relations between lovers,

parents, friends; truths about feelings and passions: truths about the emotional needs of the

viewer. But there is one truth which cannot be captured by fictional films and that is the

authenticity of life as it is lived.

Soviet cinema of the grande epoque and then films such as Le Voleur de bicyclette and La

Terre tremble tried their utmost to make certain individuals act out their own lives. But they

were still missing that particular irreducible quality which appears in "real life."2 Taking into

account all the ambivalences of the real and of the imaginary, there is in every scene taken from

life the introduction of a radically new element in the relationship between viewer and image.

Newscasts present us with life in its Sunday best—official, ritualized—men of state

shaking hands, discussions. Once in a while fate, chance, will place in our field of vision a

shriveled or a beaming face, an accident, a fragment of truth. This scene taken from life is most

often a scene taken from death. As a general rule the camera is too heavy, it is not mobile
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 445

enough, the sound equipment can't follow the action, and what is live escapes or closes up.

Cinema needs a set, a staged ceremony, a halt to life. And then everyone masquerades—

equipped with a supplementary mask on the camera.

Cinema cannot penetrate the depth of daily life as it is really lived. There remains the

resource of the "camera-thief," like that of Dziga Vertov, camouflaged in a car and stealing

snatches of life from the streets,3 or like the film Nice Time, stealing kisses, smiles, people

waiting outside Picadilly Circus. But they can't be seized or caught like scattered snapshots.

There remains the resource of camouflaging the camera behind plate glass, as in the

Czechoslovakian documentary Les Enfants nous parlent, but indiscretion seems to halt the

filmmaker just as he becomes a spy.

Cinéma-vérité was thus at an impasse if it wanted to capture the truth of human relations

in real life. What it could seize was the work and actions in field or the factory; there was the

world of machine and technology; there were the great masses of humanity in motion. It is, in

fact, this direction that was chosen by Joris Ivens, for example, or the English documentary

school of Grierson.

There were some successful breakthroughs into peasant world, as in Henri Storck's La

Symphonie paysanne and Georges Rouquier's Le Farrebique. The filmmaker entered a

community and succeeded in revealing something of its life to us. There were some equally

extraordinary breakthroughs into the world of the sacred and of ceremonies, for example

Rouquier's Lourdes and Jean Rouch's Les Maître fous. But documentary cinema as a whole

remains outside human beings, giving up the battle with fictional film over this terrain.

Is there anything new today? We got the impression at Florence that there was a new movement

to reinterrogate man by means of cinema, as in The Lambeth Boys, a documentary on a youth

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 446

club in London (awarded a prize at Tours); or On the Bowery, a documentary on the drunkards in

a section of New York; or The Hunters, a documentary on the Bushmen; and, of course, the

already well-known films of Jean Rouch.

The great merit of Jean Rouch is that he has defined a new type of filmmaker, the

"filmmaker-diver” who "plunges" into real-life situations.4 Ridding himself of the customary

technical encumbrances and equipped only with a 16mm camera and a tape recorder slung across

his shoulders, Rouch can then infiltrate a community as a person and not as the director of a film

crew. He accepts the clumsiness, the absence of dimensional sound, the imperfection of the

visual image. In accepting the loss of formal aesthetic, he discovers virgin territory, a life which

possesses aesthetic secrets within itself. His ethnographer's conscience prevents him from

betraying the truth, from embellishing upon it.

What Rouch did in Africa has now begun in our own Western civilization. On the

Bowery penetrates the real society of drunkards, who are really drunk, and the live location

sound recording puts us right in the middle of a live take on what is really happening. Of course,

it is relatively easy to film drunken men who are not bothered by the presence of a camera

among them. Of course, we stay on the margin of real everyday life. But The Lambeth Boys tries

to show us what young people really are like at play. This could have been achieved only

through participant observation, the integration of the filmmaker into the youth clubs, and at the

price of a thousand imperfections, or rather of the abandonment of ordinary framing rules. But

this type of reporting opens up a prodigiously difficult new route to us. We have the feeling that

the documentary wants to leave the world of production in order to show us the world of

consumption, to leave the world of the bizarre or the picturesque in order to research the world of

intimacy in human relations, or the essence of our lives.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 447

The new cinéma-vérité in search of itself possesses from now on its "camera-pen," which

allows an author to draft his film alone (16mm camera and portable tape recorder in hand). It had

its pioneers, those who wanted to penetrate beyond appearances, beyond defenses, to enter the

unknown world of daily life.

Its true father is doubtless much more Robert Flaherty than Dziga Vertov. Nanook

revealed, in a certain way, the very bedrock of all civilization; the tenacious battle of man against

nature, draining, tragic, but finally victorious. We rediscovered this Flahertian spirit in The

Hunters, where pre—Iron Age Bushmen chase game which escapes them.5

We chose this film for an award not only for its fundamental human truth, but also

because this truth suddenly revealed to us our inconceivable yet certain kinship with that tough

and tenacious humanity, while all other films have shown us its exotic foreignness. The honesty

of this ethnographic film makes it a hymn to the human race. Can we now hope for equally

human films about workers, the petty bourgeois, the petty bureaucrats, about the men and

women of our enormous cities? Must these people remain more foreign to us than Nanook the

Eskimo, the fisherman of Aran, or the Bushman hunter? Can't cinema be one of the means of

breaking that membrane which isolates each of us from others in the metro, on the street, or on

the stairway of the apartment building? The quest for a new cinéma-vérité is at the same time a

quest for a "cinema of brotherhood."6

P.S. Make no mistake. It is not merely a question of giving the camera that lightness of

the pen which would allow the filmmaker to mingle in the lives of people. It is at the same time a

question of making an effort to see that the subjects of the film will recognize themselves in their

own roles. We know that there is a profound kinship between social life and the theater, because

our social personalities are made up of roles which we have incorporated within ourselves. It is
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 448

thus possible, as in a sociodrama, to permit each person to play out his life before the camera.7

And as in a sociodrama, this game has the value of psychoanalytic truth, that is to say, precisely

that which is hidden or repressed comes to the surface in these roles, the very sap of life which

we seek everywhere and which is, nonetheless, within us. More than in social drama, this

psychoanalytic truth is played for the audience, who emerges from its cinematographic catalepsy

and awakens to a human message. It is then that we can feel for a moment that truth is that which

is hidden within us, beneath our petrified relationships. It is then that modern cinema can realize,

and it can only realize it through cinéma-vérité that lucid consciousness of brotherhood where

the viewer finds himself to be less alien to his fellow man, less icy and inhuman, less encrusted

in a false life.

******************************************************************************

In Florence, I proposed to Rouch that he do a film on love, which would be an antidote to La

Française et l'amour, in preparation at that time. When we met again in February in Paris, I

abandoned this project, as it seemed too difficult, and I suggested this simple theme: How do you

live?'', a question which should encompass not only the way of life (housing, work) but also

“How do you manage in life?", "What do you do with your life?''

Rouch accepted. But we had to find a producer. I laid out the idea in two minutes to

Anatole Dauman (Argos Films), whom I had recently met. Dauman, seduced by the combination

of Rouch and "How do you live?” replied laconically, "I'll buy it.''

I then wrote the following synopsis for the filming authorization, which we had to request

of the C.N.C. (Centre National de la Cinématographie).

This film is research. The context of this research is Paris. It is not a fictional film. This

research concerns real life. This is not a documentary film. This research does not aim to
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 449

describe; it is an experiment lived by its authors and its actors. This is not, strictly speaking, a

sociological film. Sociological film researches society. It is an ethnological film in the strong

sense of the term: it studies mankind.

It is an experiment in cinematographic interrogation. "How do you live?" That is to say,

not only the way of life (housing, work, leisure), but the style of life, the attitude people have

toward themselves and toward others, their means of conceiving their most profound problems

and the solutions to those problems. This question ranges from the most basic, everyday,

practical problems to an investigation of man himself, without wanting, a priori, to favor one or

the other of these problems. Several lines of questioning stand out: the search for happiness; is

one happy or unhappy; the question of well-being and the question of love; equilibrium or lack

thereof; stability or instability; revolt or acceptance.

This investigation is carried out with men and women, of various ages, of various

backgrounds (office workers, laborers, merchants, intellectuals, worldly people, etc.) and will

concentrate on a certain number of individuals (six to ten) who are quite different from each

other, although none of these individuals could rightly be considered a general "social type."

Considering this approach, we could call this film "two authors in search of six

characters." This Pirandellian movement of research will be sensitive and will serve as the

dynamic springboard for the film. The authors themselves mingle with the characters; there is

not a moat on either side of the camera but free circulation and exchanges. The characters assist

in the search, then dissociate themselves, then return to it, and so on. Certain centers of interest

are localized (a certain cafe or group of friends) or are polarized (the problems of couples or of

bread winning).
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 450

Our images will no doubt unveil gestures and attitudes in work, in the street, in daily life,

but we will to create a climate of conversation, of spontaneous discussions, which will be

familiar and free and in which the profound nature of our characters and the problems will

emerge. Our film will not be a matter of scenes acted out or of interviews but of a sort of

psychodrama carried out collectively among authors and characters. This is one of the richest

and least exploited universes of cinematographic expression.

At the end of our research we will gather our characters together; most of them will not

yet have met each other; some will have become acquainted partially or by chance. We will

show them what has been filmed so far (at a stage in the editing which has not yet been

determined) and in doing so attempt the ultimate psychodrama, the ultimate explication. Did

each of them learn something about him/herself? Something about the others? Will we be closer

to each other or will there just be embarrassment, irony, skepticism? Were we able to talk about

ourselves? Can we talk to others? Did our faces remain masks? However, whether we reach

success or failure in communications during this final confrontation, the success is enough, and

the failure is itself a provisional response as it shows how difficult it is to communicate and in a

way enlightens us about the truth we are seeking. In either case, the ambition of this film is that

the question, which came from the two author-researchers and was incarnated by means of the

real individuals throughout the film, will project itself on the theater screen, and that each viewer

will ask himself the question "How do you live?", "What do you do in your life?" There will be

no "THE END" but an open "to be continued" for each one.

******************************************************************************

In the course of subsequent discussions, Dauman, Rouch, and I reach an agreement to proceed

with some "trial runs." I propose some dinners in a private home (this will be in Marceline's
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 451

apartment). The starting principle will be commensality… that is, that in the course of excellent

meals washed down with good wines8 we will entertain a certain number of people from

different backgrounds, solicited for the film. The meal brings them together with the film

technicians (cameraman, sound recordist, grips) and should create an atmosphere of camaraderie.

At a certain given moment, we will start filming. The problem is to lift people's inhibitions, the

timidity provoked by the film studio and cold interviews, and to avoid as much as possible the

sort of "game" where each person, even if he doesn't play a role determined by someone else,

still composes a character for himself. This method aims to make each person's reality emerge. In

fact, the "commensality," bringing together individuals who like and feel camaraderie with each

other, in a setting which is not the film studio, but a room in an apartment, creates a favorable

climate for communication.

Once filming begins, the actors at the table, isolated by the lighting but surrounded by

friendly witnesses, feel as though they are in a sort of intimacy. When they allow themselves to

be caught up in the questions, they descend progressively and naturally into themselves. It is

pretty difficult to analyze what goes on. It is, in a way, the possibility of a confessional but

without a confessor, the possibility of a confession to all and to no one the possibility of being a

bit of one's self.

This experience also takes on meaning for the person being questioned because it is

destined for the cinema, that is to say, for isolated individuals in a dark theater, invisible and

anonymous, but present. The prospect of being televised, on the other hand, would not provoke

such internal liberation, because then it is no longer a matter of addressing everyone and no one,

but of addressing people who are eating, talking.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 452

Of course, no question is prepared in advance. And everything must be improvised. I

propose to approach, through a certain number of characters, the problem of work (the laborers),

of housing and vacations (the Gabillons), of the difficulty of living (Marceline, Marilou). Rouch

chooses the technicians: the cameraman Morillère, who works with him at the Musée de

l'Homme, the sound recordist Rophé, the electrician Moineau. We start at the end of May, as

soon as Rouch finishes La Pyramide humaine.

The first meal concerns Marceline, who also plays the role of all-purpose assistant during

this preliminary phase. In spite of the dinner, all three of us are very tense and intimidated. It is

the beginning of this meal which appears the first sequence of the film (the essential part of the

rest of that conversation is also reproduced in this volume). At the screening of the rushes, we

are disappointed. Marceline has narrated episodes of her life, but she has not revealed herself.

My first questions were brutal and clumsy; Marceline closed up, and I went back in my shell. It’s

Rouch who revived the dialogue.

At the second meal we have Jacques Mothet. Jacques is a P2 at Renault and belongs to a

group called "Socialism or Barbarity." I think he is the only one since Navel to describe in an

Illuminating way what goes on in a factory. I do not share the views of "Socialism or Barbarity,"

and Mothet considers me with a certain distrust. It was upon my insistence that he agreed to

participate in this trial. In the course of the meal a lively discussion pits him against Moineau,

our electrician, who scorns factory workers, having emancipated himself to find an independent

profession. We get so caught up in the discussion that it does not occur to us to film; we realize

too late that we have let something essential escape. We ask Jacques and Moineau to take up the

debate again. We film, but there is no longer the same spontaneity.9 [A short fragment of this

scene was integrated in the film. Moineau is cut out; Jacques talks about workers who
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 453

unsuccessfully try to leave the factory. This fragment is edited together with a later discussion

which brings together Jacques, Angélo, and Jean.]

The third trial run is with Marilou. Marilou has been adrift for several months, and during

this time I have not had a conversation with her. To my mind, Marilou confirms the idea that the

best are those who live with the most difficulty. It suffices here to say that for me the question

"How do you live?' necessarily and fundamentally implicated Marilou. The naive viewer will be

surprised if I say that ordinarily and, especially in public, Marilou is shy. What happened that

evening was an unforeseen and distressing plunge, of which the camera evidently only recorded

that which emerged in the language and on the face of Marilou.10 (In the filmscript that follows

we have almost fully restored my dialogue with Marilou that was cut from the film.)

For the fourth trial we invite Jacques Gabillon and his wife, Simone. I knew Gabillon

during the time when I was the editor of the Patriot Resistant, the journal of the F.N.D.I.R.P.

(Federation of Resistant and Patriotic Deportees and Internees). From Bordeaux, he came to

Paris, where he had great difficulty finding work and housing. Since then he has been an

employee of the S.N.C.P. (the national railroad) for several years. I have the impression that

Simone and Jacques invest a large portion of their aspirations on vacations, which are made

easier for them by the availability of free railroad tickets. In fact they are leaving this very

evening to spend the Pentecost holidays in Brittany, and we are hoping to hold them here right

up to the last minute, so that the camera could record live their fear of missing the train. Through

them we plan to raise the issue of modern-day vacations. But I start by talking to them about the

question of housing and the conversation takes an unexpected turn (bedbugs). At this point there

is a camera failure, and they leave without attacking the question of vacations. [A section of this
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 454

scene was put in the film at the beginning of a second Gabillon interview, which we filmed later;

at the end of June or early July.]

We want a student, Marceline insists that we take Jean-Pierre. I hesitate because he is too

close to Marceline. Rouch says Jean-Pierre is okay. I give in to their opinion (I won't regret it).

At the same time it will eventually be a matter of a new trial run with Marceline, who had

overcomposed her character in her first trial. We do not forewarn Marceline that she will be

included in the course of this dinner. We only tell her to remain seated next to Jean-Pierre. We

find that it is difficult to begin a conversation with him. I try to ask him what his reactions are to

people of my age. After a few abstract exchanges, Jean-Pierre talks about his feeling of

impotence and evokes the woman that he had been unable to make happy. Then I address myself

to Marceline, who is very moved. [The last part of this interaction is almost totally preserved in

the film.]

Finally we film an encounter between Marcaine and Marilou in the presence of Jean-

Pierre. Marceline and Marilou had met a month or two earlier and liked each other. Then there

was a cooling of this friendship, which I attributed to the first trial runs. (We had been moved by

Marilou's trial run, disappointed with Marceline's.) I thought it healthy to open up an explication

in front of the camera, during a dinner, of course, in hopes of provoking a revival of the lost

friendship by means of a frank explication. In fact, I provoked an even more marked

confrontation, in which each one in turn retreated into her solitude. Nothing from this discussion,

perhaps the first real argument which has been recorded on film, was included in the final

film.11

The “trial runs” are finished. We don't know yet that what will end up being the essence

of our film has already been shot. The producers have decided to continue but on the condition
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 455

that Rouch agree to take on a cameraman of great talent (Sacha Vierny) and a master editor

(Colpi). I myself would agree, as I accord small importance to such matters, but Rouch, who can

only work with technicians that he gets along with well, wants to choose his own. After

exhausting discussions, Rouch accepts Viguier (cameraman for Lourdes by Rouquier) and

Tarbès.

At the same time Rouch is negotiating with Pierre Braunberger, producer of his preceding

films, who does not want Rouch to undertake anything before reworking the editing of La

Pyramide humaine.

Besides this, Rouch and I are beginning to have our differences. For him, the words

spoken in the course of the trial runs should illustrate the images. He has had enough of filming

in place, in a room with a camera on a tripod. He has had even more than enough of seeing that

everything filmed so far is sad; it needs joyful things, gaiety, the other aspect of life. He think the

film should be centered on two or three heroes; otherwise the spectator runs the risk of being lost

in a succession of images, unable to relate to characters he knows nothing about. If necessary, we

would establish a plausible plot, as in La Pyramide humaine. On top of this, Rouch wants to

finish up some research which is close to completion: to film in the street with synchronous

sound, that is, for example, to capture the conversation of two friends who are walking down the

Champs-Élysées. Finally, in this end of June, beginning of July, Rouch thinks that some

considerable event may evolve in the course of the summer (generalized conflict starting with the

events in the Congo? Peace in Algeria with the conversations of Melun?), and that we must film

Summer 1960 as a chronicle of that capital moment in history.12

As for me, I think that the trials are only interesting if the words emerge from the faces,

in close-ups of Gabillon, Marceline, Jean-Pierre, Marilou, Jacques. I think that we must now go
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 456

to Jacques’ actual workplace, that is, to the Renault factory, and maybe film other places of

work, like the offices of the S.N.C.F. where Gabillon is employed. We should also go to leisure

places, in the streets of the city. We should attack the political problems which weigh down this

summer of 1960-the Congo, the war of Algeria-but I would not like the theme of “How do you

live?” to dissolve into the “chronicle of a summer.” Neither would I like to dissolve into two or

three people, nor would I like it to be characters, but multiple presences. This means pursuing a

survey on three levels: the level of private life, internal and subjective; the level of work and

social relations; and finally the level of present history, dominated by the war in Algeria. The

film should be a montage of images in which the question “How do you live” is transformed into

“How can one live?” and “What can one do?” which would bounce off the viewer.

Pressed from all sides, in different directions, two producers, and by me, Rouch

establishes a modus vivendi with Braunberger and accepts Viguier-Tarbès from Dauman. While

I am forced to be away from Paris, he films on the Champs-Élysées, in synchronous sound, Jean-

Pierre and his friends taking a walk; introduces them to some other people, among whom is

Marilou; finally he films a fourteenth of July dance with Jean-Pierre, Régis, Marilou, Landry,

and Marceline.

After the Champs-Élysées filming, a triangular discussion opposes Dauman, Viguier, and

Rouch. Dauman complains about the poor quality of picture. From that point on, he wants to

block any more technical improvisation and threatens to abandon the film if 'drastic" measures

are not taken.

I take advantage of the crisis to revive the meals, this time collective meals. At the

discussion on Algeria (in addition to Jean-Pierre, Régis, Marceline), Rouch introduces Jean-

Marc, a young filmmaker, and I introduce Céline, a Communist student. This discussion was in
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 457

fact quite lively, violent, and at certain moments pathetic, at others comical (I was drunk by

halfway through the meal); Viguier and the sound recordist, Guy Rophé, participated quite

spontaneously. [Only a few pale tatters of this discussion remain in the film, since we have

omitted the section where certain of the young people got very heavily involved.]

The discussion on the Congo is filmed in the open air, on the terrace of the Totem, the

restaurant at the Musée de l'Homme. Rouch has introduced Nadine, Landry, and Raymond, who

appeared in La Pyramide humaine while they were high school students in Abidjan. Two

discussions result: one unforeseen discussion on sexual relations between blacks and whites and

the other or the Congo. The first ending the moment Marceline explains the meaning of the

number tattooed on her arm.

At this moment, Viguier and Tarbès leveled camera at Landry's suddenly solemn face:

then frame the face of Nadine, who has begun to cry near Landry. At that second the film in the

camera runs out, and we could only capture the beginning Nadine's emotion, as she hides her

face in her hands.

Two remarks: (1) In this type of filming, the framing must follow the event. In ordinary

films the event is circumscribed by a preestablished frame composition. Here, however,

everything depends on instinct, on a sort of telepathic communication, which is established

between the cameraman and the scene. It is the cameraman's responsibility to capture the

significant face, which is not necessarily the speaker's face; in the course of filming. Morillère,

Rouch, Viguier, Tarbès, and (later) Brault all had some of these inspired moments which

involved more than talent: sympathy and communication.

(2) The expression on a face in tears is radically different in acted cinema and in lived

cinema. In acted cinema, the actor forces the expression on his face to signify his tears: even
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 458

when he is really moved, he exaggerates his emotion so as to convey it. In real life, we make

tremendous efforts to dissemble tears: we hold back sobs, tighten our facial muscles; we inhibit

instead of exhibit. This was revealed at the playback projection of the scenes where Marceline

(the dinner with Jean-Pierre), Marilou, and Nadine (fleetingly, because there was no more film)

are in tears.

Around the twentieth of July we lose our cameraman. However, I have already made

arrangements with Renault Corporation so that we can film in their factory workshops. We have

to film before July 28, the date when the factory closes for vacation. I had already asked Jacques

to pick out some young workers to do a discussion-dinner on their work, and there was only one

evening—or night, rather—when we could get them together after work let out.

Argos Films assigned us a director of production, who has the disagreeable job of

overseeing the technical conditions of the filming. He is ordered to authorize filming only if a

clapstick slate is used: this order was not always respected. It is a director of shorts, Heinrich,

who accepted this job so as to watch Rouch film and to get to know his methods. As I insist on

the need for the workers' meal, Heinrich calls on two television cameramen. We go to the factory

exit to look for Jacques, who introduces us to Angélo and Jean. The technical preparations are

difficult. It is late. We are tired. We film at around three in the morning a discussion which

reveals Angélo and Jean to us. [Only a thin fragment of this discussion is integrated in the film.]

We have forty-eight hours before vacation closing film in the Renault factories at Billancourt.

We hire Coutard, who worked with a hand-held camera in Godard's A bout de souffle and who is

free for a few days before he has to begin Le petit soldat. What we have to film, unlike industrial

documentaries, is not machines but the faces and hands of the workers. The vacant faces of those

who do mechanical work, the specialized workers, appendages of their machines, eternally
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 459

repeating the same gestures. We should also film the relationships between boss-foremen and

workers, but this is impossible; we would have to camouflage microphones and cameras in every

corner of the shops.

Following Jacques's indications, I keep an eye out for the most significant scenes. While

Coutard's assistant cameraman, Beausoleil, sets up a camera on a tripod with a microphone fixed

next to it, Coutard and Rouch wander among the machines. Coutard, with 35mm camera in hand,

ultrasensitive film (which needs no lighting), and telephoto lens, shoots scenes of the factory

without being noticed. We also film the great vacation exodus from the factory, with three

cameras set up at different points. We accumulate almost an hour and a half of film. We have not

filmed Angélo, Jean, and Jacques at their machines for fear of unfavorable reactions from the

management, either for them later or for us at the moment.

Shortly thereafter—or shortly before?—we have a dinner with the Gabillons, again at

Marceline's apartment, where we bring up several different subjects about happiness and about

work. Jacques Gabillon talks about ''two men" who are in him and of the modern-day man, "a

bunch of identity papers." [Part of this meal makes up the second half of the Gabillon sequence.]

In the meantime Rouch and Dauman reach an agreement to hire the Canadian cameraman

Michel Brault. Brault had shot some short films with a hand-held camera and in synchronous

sound for the Canadian National Film Board. Rouch knew him and admired his work. After

several intercontinental telegrams and phone calls, Brault agrees to come and arrives in Paris at

the end of July, beginning of August. This is the chance for Rouch to victoriously resume his

filming experiments in the street, in nature, with synchronous sound. This time Rouchian

“pédovision” will replace my "commensality." (This is what we call the two methods used in this

film).
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 460

The fifteenth of August approaches. Rouch wants to film Marceline alone in the streets of

deserted Paris on August 15. Marceline proposes going to the Place de la Concorde where

Dmytryck is making a film about the German occupation. It is studded with Wermacht direction

signs; there are extras dressed up as German soldiers. We arrive at the Place de la Concorde on

August 15, but Dmytryck's filming ended the day before. The German signs have disappeared,

no more Wermacht.

Rouch inaugurates the new methods: Marceline will have a tape recorder slung across her

shoulders, connected to a slip-on lavaliere microphone brought by Brault; she will walk along,

talking to herself in a low voice. Brault films her from Rouch's 2CV with Rouch at his side.

Heinrich, Rophé, his assistant, and I push the 2CV for the dolly shot. We continue at the Place de

l'Opéra, hardly deserted. August 15 was quite populated this year—not only tourists, but

Parisians as well. I propose a quiet street in the Sentier, rue Beauregard (where a few unknowns

begin to gather) and then Les Halles where the strangely dead setting, a sort of station from a

nightmare, makes Marceline recall the transport to Auschwitz and the return. To establish

contact with normal life, Rouch makes Marceline walk under the Arcades on the rue de Rivoli,

where she continues to talk to herself whenever inspired by the store windows. [In the film we

have kept the Place de la Concorde and Les Halles sequences from this filming.]

Once again Rouch is struck with the desire to leave the "sad" problems and look for

something else. He takes advantage of a meeting in Saint Jean de Luz with Braunberger to take

off with Nadine, Landry, and Brault. He films several scenes between Nadine and Landry on the

road at the seashore where Nadine and Landry are supposed to be two student hitchhikers who

take off to the south of France on vacation. [From this shooting, there remains a fragment of the

bullfight in the final film.]

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 461

Rouch wants to film Saint Tropez, continuing the hitchhiking adventure of Landry and

Nadine, and reintroducing Marilou, Jean-Pierre, and Marceline. As this idea holds absolutely no

appeal for me, he tries to win me over by saying that we'll film my little daughters in Saint

Tropez, discovering some new starlets. What finally makes up my mind is the idea of Landry as

"black explorer of France on vacation."

Meantime Rouch has the idea of a pseudo-Brigitte Bardot, whom we will put in the

setting Saint Tropez. This idea appeals to Dauman, who sets out to look for pseudo-Brigitte

Bardots, his associate Lifchitz goes off on his own hunt. We run the risk of being inundated with

false B.B.'s, but Argos Films, to economize, only hires one—the real Sophie Destrade.

While the Saint Tropez expedition is being prepared to Rouch's great joy, I learn that

Marilou feeding a new life. She no longer feels as lonely as before and has met a young man

with whom she is in love. I propose a new dialogue with Marilou, which takes place in my home.

Marilou has forewarned me that she will not talk about her friend, her apprehension makes her

very nervous (We had to wait two hours before the equipment was ready to function, and she had

to get back to her office.) As she spoke her facial expression changed from joy to fear to the

sadness of memory to hope. [.'Marilou is Happy" sequence.]

Marceline has stayed in Paris while Jean-Pierre is on vacation with Régis is in the south.

She thinks Jean-Pierre is drifting away from her. She has family problems. We film a

conversation with her but she has been, unconsciously, influenced by the rushes she has seen of

Marilou. [This dialogue with Marceline was not integrated into the film.] From this point on, we

no longer show the rushes to the participants, except to Angélo, who has a skeptical, even ironic,

interest in our enterprise.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 462

Rouch, Brault, Marilou, Landry, Nadine, and Catherine take the “Caravelie” airliner.

Rouch introduces Catherine, who is a happy woman: she has no problems, says he (unfortunately

she will have some problems in Saint Tropez). In the plane, Rouch films a conversation between

Catherine and Landry, who pretend they are just meeting. He films Marilou and Landry. In the

train from Nice to Saint Raphael he films again. [Nothing of all of this is preserved in the film.]

At this point Rouch and I have a clear difference of opinion. Rouch wants to film a

surrealist dream with Marilou, where she wanders alone in the night, dances, goes for a walk in

the cemetery, meets a man who is wearing the mask of Eddie Constantine; the man pursues her,

unmasks himself, it's Landry. I tell him that I am against this scene, as any fiction falsifies the

very meaning of what has already been filmed. Rouch films Catherine waterskiing. l grumble.

Finally we reach an agreement: I'll stick to everything having to do with “Landry, black

explorer,” I'll stick to the false Brigitte Bardot and to the staged publicity photographers

attracting the crowd of tourists; l propose a collective discussion on the theme of Saint Tropez,

and I maintain that we must film a dialogue between Jean-Pierre and Marceline.13

The Saint Tropez discussion takes place on the terrace of a hotel, but the film used to

record this discussion was, by mistake, mostly ultrasensitive film. [The film retains a brief

moment of the usable segment, and Sophie's comments in the discussion are used as voice-over

while she walks at l'Epi beach.]

I revive the theme of happiness in a conversation filmed with my two daughters, with Landry

intervening. [A fragment of the conversation was preserved in the film.]

During these two days of filming, Marceline and Jean-Pierre are having difficulties in

their relationship. I ask them again if they would agree to try to work out their relationship in

front of the camera. I tell Jean-Pierre separately that this scene, where for the first time the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 463

camera would film a couple's discussion, would only be meaningful if it were not thought out in

advance. Since for some time Marceline has had the tendency of composing her own character,

Jean-Pierre would have to avoid allowing the climate of their dialogue to become too literary.

What would Marceline and Jean-Pierre decide? I don't know. We waited until the last moment to

tell Jean-Pierre and Marceline that it was their turn, and Rouch chose a little nearby jetty. There

is a strong mistral on the embankment. Jean-Pierre and Marceline sit side by side. Rouch is

listening in through headphones; he's the only one who can hear the dialogue. Brault is lying

three meters away with the camera, and I myself at three meters' distance can hear nothing. Jean-

Pierre has the clip-on lavaliere microphone. From time to time Brault says "cut,' he changes

angle; Jean-Pierre responds by clapping his hands to slate the next scene, {.This scene was

condensed in the editing, not by choosing one continuous segment, but by selecting and

juxtaposing different moments. The viewer also sees frequent shot changes, and under these

conditions it is difficult to escape the idea of staging, especially since it is difficult to believe that

a couple could agree to give themselves up in such a way to the camera. This sequence, which

was cut out by Argos in the copy passed on exclusively to the "Agriculteurs," is kept in the other

copies.14 It shows much more pointedly than the other sequences the problems of conventional

cinematic editing in relation to our filmed material. In spite of the misunderstandings it might

engender, I think this scene necessary, because it witnesses an extreme point of our enterprise.15

We return to Paris. Argos (in a new repressive phase) wants to limit our filming days.

Rouch cannot film if he feels pressured. I suggest to Rouch that he accept the limits; if we have

not completed our program, Argos will be obliged to make us finish the film. But interminable

discussions continue.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 464

Nonetheless, I establish a filming schedule in a spirit of compromise with Rouch: since

Rouch wants some "heroes," I make an effort to put some emphasis on the worker-heroes

Angélo, Jacques, Jean. At the same time, in order to revive the theme of "How do you live?”,

which has already been considerably compromised, I propose interviews in the street where

Marceline and Nadine stop passersby and them "Are you happy?”Again I take up the theme we

had already planned, of encounters among our characters: worker-student encounters, encounters

of women among themselves, encounters of men to lead up to the grand final encounter. To start,

we are going to approach the question of the return from vacation. Rouch accepts this program.

He also wants to film conversations on the terrace of a cafe (Les Des Magots), in a department

store like Galeries Lafayette, and an encounter in the women's shop Catherine has on the Left

Bank. The film crew for last shooting period is made up of: cameraman: Brault; sound: Rophé

(in his absence either Rouch or Boucher take care of it), and general assistants: Morillère and

Boucher, who are attached to the committee on ethnographic film. Rouch has arranged with the

engineer Coutant the possibility of working with his new prototype electronic 16mm camera,

which is lighter and, more important, soundproof, that is to say, we can film anywhere, without a

"'blimp" to at absorb camera noise.

The end of vacation means first of all back to school: we film Irène, Véronique, and their

little friend Dominique leaving the Fenelon high school during first days of school and walking

home on rue Soufflot. The Rouch technique is in full force here. Véronique has the clip-on

microphone and a tape recorder slung over her shoulders; they walk freely. Brault, guided by

hand signals from Rouch, follows or precedes them, filming up close with a wide-angle lens.

Thus in this procession where filmers and filmees almost form one body, the normal movement

of passersby is almost undisturbed, the characters in movement feel at ease with the camera, their
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 465

comments are directly related to the spectacle in the street (a France-Soir headline, a cinema

poster, a shop window, etc.). The sound leaves something to be desired: every step Véronique

takes jostles the tape recorder; we can hear a sound like a heartbeat, certain words are barely

audible. We also film Véronique and Irène doing their first homework, questioned by Nadine on

their first days back to school and on the characters in the film. These scenes we not included in

the film. I would have liked to see them ask more about the opinion of the two little girls on the

world of adults, on their own "How do you live?"

The end of vacation is also Jean-Pierre preparing for his philosophy exams, which he

failed in June. An important theme: if Jean-Pierre fails them again in October, he will lose his

deferment and be called up for military service, that is to say, Algeria. We film a discussion

scene at Jean-Pierre's desk with Régis. They talk in ironic terms of philosophy; they consult the

list of signatures for the call of the 121, they blame Houch and me for not signing, to get a rise

out of us. Then we film Jean-Pierre coming out of his exam as he leaves the Sorbonne. Régis is

waiting for him in the square with the tape recorder over his shoulder and clip-on microphone on

his lapel. Brault films their encounter and follows them. While they head toward the Seine on

small side streets, they talk about the written dissertation, then about one thing or another in a

half-serious half-joking tone, One the quays of the Seine, Régis asks Jean-Pierre what his plans

are for the future and whether he imagines himself joining in. Jean-Pierre does not want to join

in. They walk along the quays toward the east, toward the future, says Régis, who will in the next

year belong to the Communist party. When Jean-Pierre finds out he has passed, we film. Rouch,

M?, and Jean-Pierre walking in the gardens of the l'Observatoire. Jean-Pierre is questioned about

his plans for the future. [None of those scenes is included in the final film.]
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 466

The end of vacation is Marilou returning home; her fragile happiness seems to have

consolidated a bit. We shoot a scene in a hotel room on rue Git-le Couer where she goes to see

her friend Jeanne whom she hasn’t seen since she got back. Jeanne asks her questions about her

vacation, her plans. Marilou is relaxed, cheerful. This scene is kept up to the last moment, which

was finally not included in the film (to my great regret… since it showed Marilou smiling and

joking) as with almost all scenes dealing with the return from vacation and events following the

vacations.

The end of vacation is also the Gabillons returning with souvenirs and photos of their

vacation in Spain. We go to the Gabillons’ apartment in their low-cost housing development in

Clichy, and we film their breakfast and ask them to bring out their photos and talk about their

vacation. [This scene was not included in the film.]

In filming the return from vacation, we took advantage of the chance to film daily life.

Marilou and her boyfriend getting washed and dressed in her little room; the camera follows

them down the service stairs (the longest stairway traveling shot that has ever been done, Brault's

camera following Marilou’s hands on the banister rail) in the street, then Marilou walking up the

Champs-Élysées, going into her office (at Cahiers du Cinéma), working on some letters and

typing. [Some of these shots were included. One at the beginning of the first Marilou sequence,

the other at the end of the second Marilou sequence).]

Daily life that means filming the life outside of work of Angélo, Jean, Jacques. We start

with Angélo, whom we meet at the exit of the factory and who is then followed by Brault in the

street, on the bus, at home, without interruption until nightfall. We don't know where Angélo

lives, and we discover the interminable stairway which goes up to the Clamart plateau (we could

not have found such a setting if we had searched for one like it), the suburban streets, which
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 467

change from urban to rustic, and finally the little cottage where Angélo lives with his mother. We

also discover how Angélo spends his time: doing judo exercises (he is a judoka amateur), playing

guitar, reading (a life of Danton), then dinner and bed. Since Angélo gets up at 4:45 the next

morning, he goes to bed early. We tell him to leave his key in the door so we can film him

waking up. At three in the morning, Morillère comes to wake me up while Boucher waits in the

street. Completely naked, haggard, I open the door for him. He flees. I catch up to him and then

call Rouch. I tear him from his sleep. Rouch phones Brault. We pick up Rouch and Brault in

Dauphine, and, cursing the film, empty-stomached, we hurry to Clamart. In the darkness, we

penetrate like burglars into Angélo’s little garden. Boucher steps in manure, stifling his curses.

We finally enter the bedroom on tiptoe, holding back our laughter, Brault hoists his camera up to

his shoulder and that's the signal: we turn on the lights. While Brault shoots, we see Angélo

coming out of sleep under the effects of the light. When he discovers us, flabbergasted, he curses

at us, and we burst into laughter. [This shot of his waking is retained in the film. It does not

strike the spectator, who cannot tell the difference with a fake movie alarm-clock ring.] Angélo

has his coffee with milk, brought to him by his mother, then gets up, washes, gets dressed, leaves

the house, takes the bus, etc. . . the camera follows him up till the moment when he disappears

into the factory by the great door on the Place National, while we see, as though a director had

prepared everything, two guards in uniform watching the entrances and, in front of the door, a

worker distributing leaflets. [A certain number of snots from this Angélo filming were preserved

and edited into the final film.]

This same morning Angélo is called in by the management of his shop, where he is

informed that he has been transferred to another, very tough shop. Did this bullying have

anything to do with our cinematographic intervention the day before, at the factory exit? (The
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 468

shop foreman said to him, "So, we're making movies now?") The next morning Angélo comes to

find me and explains the affair. As Rouch is supposed to come with Brault a bit later, I tell him

that we absolutely must film. They arrive, and Angélo explains what happened to Rouch in a

three-sided discussion. They ask him about his future. Angélo, discouraged, wants to leave the

tool machines. Could we find him work? We'll have to look around. [An important part of this

scene was included in the film. Even though chronologically it takes place after vacation, we put

it in before the vacation sequences, given that we wanted to include it and that we wanted to end

the film at the end of the vacation.)

Following this incident, Jean, the young worker-turned-draftsman, no longer wants to be

filmed. He only agrees to participate in a discussion between students and workers. We film

Jacques waking, getting up, leaving for the factory; he lives in Montmartre and goes by

motorbike to Billancourt. We follow him in two cars, one behind lighting him with its headlights,

the other either beside him or slightly ahead, with Brault filming. [None of this is included in the

film].

Taking advantage of the last weeks of good weather, Jacques, his wife, their children,

Angélo, and sometimes other friends often go to Fontainebleau forest, near Milly, for the

weekend. Even though Rouch is again deeply involved in worker life, I insist that we go to

Milly-la-Forêt. Rouch organizes a parallel expedition with Nadine, Catherine, and Landry. We

leave in several cars and with two cameras (Brault and Morillère). We have a picnic and film

what is going on (rock climbing, climbing down with ropes, children’s games, songs). [One part

of what was filmed here constitutes the Milly-la-Forêt sequence in the film.]

Are you happy? Since the beginning of the film, Rouch has thought that Nadine could be

a sort of woman-sphinx who would ask a riddle of passersby in the street. To my mind, this
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 469

question should be "Are you happy?" asked by Marceline and Nadine together (one alone would

be intimidated) in different areas of Paris. The camera would be hidden in a car; the microphone

would be visible. We film at Place du Pantheon, rue Soufflot. Place de la Bastille, at

Ménilmontant, at the Passy metro, at Place Victor Hugo. [A certain number of these interviews

constitute the "Are you happy?" sequence.]

At the same time we envisage several surveys in greater depth on the theme of "How do

you live?" Marceline obtains the consent of a postal service employee to interview him and his

wife in their home [not included in the film] and of a garage mechanic whom she interviews in

his shop [a good part is included in the film]. Rouch knows a happy young couple, the Cuenets,

who are also interviewed [this interview for the most part, included in the film]. At around the

same time we record a walking dialogue between me and Rouch at the Musée de l'Homme where

we try to tie things up. [This dialogue was not included in the film.]

I am keen on the encounters, and I envisage an encounter between workers and students,

an encounter among the women who participated in the film, and an encounter among the men,

before the general encounter, Material obstacles and the time factor (Argos makes it clear that

everything must be finished by the end of October) prevent us from organizing all but the

student-worker encounter. One Sunday noon, we organize a lunch at the restaurant of the Musée

de l'Homme with Angélo, Jean, Régis, and Jean-Pierre. After some embarrassing slow starts, the

conversation livens up. Angélo and Jean attack the students for their arrogance with regard to the

workers. Jean Pierre and Régis explain themselves. [This discussion was included in the film.]

At a neighboring table sat Landry, Rouch wants Angélo and Landry to meet each other. We all

go to my house, and Rouch sets them face to face on a step of the stairway. Angélo had very

much liked the rushes were Landry appeared commenting on the bullfight, moralizing to the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 470

little girls, talking about his black skin. Angélo seemed like a good guy to Landry, who had

likewise seen, him on the screen. In fact, a friendship was born before our eyes, under the eye of

the camera. At the same time Angélo fully expresses his protest against both the conditions of

the workers and what he sees as the false compensation for these conditions, this

embourgeoisement symbolized by the possession of a car.

Rouch, prepares the filming in Catherine’s shop, where Nadine, Sophie, and Marceline

are supposed to participate. There is a tension between Marceline and Catherine ever since Saint

Tropez. On top of that, Marceline is critical of Catherine’s bourgeois lifestyle. I tell Marceline

that she may ‘attack,' but I also tell her that it would be better not to touch on any private

problems. The camera is hidden in the back of the shop the microphone is also hidden.

Marceline, Nadine, and Sophie are among the clients (who are unaware of the filming), they try

things. Suddenly Marceline attacks. Her accusations become and more precise and intimate.

Whereas Catherine is very relaxed, Nadine, feeling uneasy, says to Marceline "we're leaving,"

and they depart. [We baptized this sequence "Thunder over the Petticoats. It was not included in

the film. A part the sound track is pretty inaudible; the shop door was left open for several

minutes, and the street noise drowned out the words.]

A few days later, Rouch films a conversation on terrace of the Deux Magots without

disturbing the regular customers (camera camouflaged in a car parked on the sidewalk,

microphone camouflaged under a handkerchief). Marceline and Nadine comment on the outburst

that occurred at Catherine’s. One afternoon, a couple of days later, we film at the Navy, a cafe

where Marceline is a regular. We record a conversation between Marceline and Marilou on the

terrace using the same method. Marceline talks about Jean-Pierre: she says that they have

reached an agreement, founded on freedom and mutual trust. We also film a breakfast in bed
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 471

with Marceline and Jean-Pierre, then their rising and morning ritual. [None these scenes, each of

which uncovers a new aspect of Marceline, was included in the film].

At last we shoot the final encounter. I had dreamed of a sort of confrontation in a large

room after projecting the film, with multiple cameras and microphone recording not only the

reactions to the film, but the conversations that would start up spontaneously and according to

the affinities among the different characters. A big final scene where the scales would fall and

consciousness would be awakened, where we would take a new “oath of the tennis court'' to

construct a new life.16

Of course this is no longer feasible. It is no longer possible to show the entire film. Of

course nothing has been edited, and we must hurry to finish before the deadline. We choose the

short cut of using the rushes which were specific to each of the characters. Marilou happy,

Marceline—August 15, Jean-Pierre and Régis coming out of exam, return from vacation--

GabilIon, Milly-la-Forêt, and a few other fragments. The reunion takes place in the projection

room of the Studio Publicis, in the basement. After showing the film, we open the discussion.

[This was abridged in the film, but all of the critical aspects were retained.]

In this sequence, voluntarily or involuntarily, Angélo, Marceline, and Marilou all say

something essential about themselves. Each one revealing in a word just what they had done in

the moment when the camera's eye was trained on them. I feel that Rouch is distressed by the

criticisms. We separate at the Champs-Élysées; it is raining; it’s the last reel. Brault films the

wet, glistening sidewalk, which reflects the passersby. The unfinished film is completed. Nearly

six months of effort, of passion, of arguments, of camaraderie, of experience, of research

abruptly become memories. I will no longer wake Rouch at 8am. BrauIt will take off for Canada.

Each person goes off on his own. It is autumn.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 472

The film is finished.

Renault lays off 2.000 workers. Angélo is one of them. I tried to find him work, first

doing odd jobs for some friends, while waiting. He almost learned how to make tapestries in the

studio of a friend, Yvette Prince, but the studio was going through a difficult period; he did a

stint as a warehouse man for a publishing firm, where he began to show his demanding spirit; he

was fired ("What do you want?", he asks me philosophically, "I'm a revolutionary"). Nina

Baratier, film editor, found him a place as stagehand at the Billancourt studios in the early

spring. He wants to get away from the machines, and we are trying to help him. One day Angélo

disappears from the studios. He had found a skilled worker job in a little metalwork factory,

much smaller than Renault. He was supposed to get married. He has since gotten married.

The intervention of the film has thus had a pretty powerful effect on Angélo’s life. In tne

first phase, it crystallized his revolt against the alienation of manual labor, in the hopes of

escaping machines. For several months he experienced other types of work (warehouse man,

stagehand). He was able to see the possible significance of a choice between an independent, but

chancy job and a subordinate but regular job: between his qualification as a machinist and those

of other jobs for which he had no technical training. Of course, I did not push him in any

particular direction; I always looked in the direction he indicated. If he does finally return to the

machines it will be less by force than by his own choice.

Marilou is trying hard to hold the ground she has gained. The couple has some difficult

money problems. Recently, Marilou has had the opportunity to learn a skill that is much more

interesting and freer than secretarial work, studio photography.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 473

Marceline, the film finished, could not return to her applied psychosociological surveys.

Argos helped her out. She is looking for work she would like; in fact, she could be an actress.

Jean-Pierre lives with her.

Jean-Pierre passed his exams and is pursuing his degree. He is looking for a job that

would not keep him from preparing for his next exams.

Landry, after having spent the last year in a provincial high school, is taking a private

course in Paris. Nadine is going to take her baccalaureate exams in philosophy. Gabillon took a

trip to Greece. He would like a more interesting job and hopes to get into the European railroad

agency. Régis went on vacation to Cuba and upon his return joined the Communist party. The

Cuenets are going to have a baby. All of them regret that the film only showed a one-sided view

of themselves. They all feel they are richer, more complex, than their images on film. This is

obviously true.

Editing
We have more than twenty-five hours of film, almost all of it 16mm. Now we have to

extract a film of normal length (1 1/2 hours). It's not only a technical problem (the transformation

of real time into cinematographic time, the new significance presented by images when edited,

the type of editing to choose, etc.); it's also the problem of the meaning of the film. Anything is

possible with our enormous corpus of multiple, uniform material.

Everything becomes complicated, and once again a three-sided crisis breaks out. Argos

Films wants to have one "editor-in-chief" who will give the film an "incontestable technical and

artistic quality." Rouch refuses the editors they propose and wants to choose the woman who

edited his earlier films. Rouch can only work with people he chooses according to his affinity

and compatibility. At the same time, Rouch announces that he has to go to Africa for two
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 474

months; Argos opposes his departure, which would immobilize the editing. For my part, I want

to work on the editing from a position of equality with Rouch, because I fear that the "How do

you live?" sense of the film might disappear.

For Rouch, the guiding thread should be one or two "hero" characters in the film. He

even suggests me as the hero of the film, off in search of the unfindable truth. General ideas bore

him; what he is always interested in is the living detail, spontaneity. He wants to proceed by

approximations, that is, by successive elimination of images until the normal duration is reached,

just as he did in La Pyramide humaine. He does not want to feel bound in advance by any norm,

any idea. On the contrary. On the other hand I feel that a large part of the richness of La

Pyramide humaine was lost in the editing, to the benefit of the heroine, to the benefit of the plot.

I value those themes I would like to see expressed.17

I don't have a real plan, but a sort of structure to rediscover at every stage of the

elaboration of the film. Thus, for example, at the end of July, Argos Films asked for a schema of

the editing, as assurance that we were not simply filming at random. I improvised a text where

the following themes were presented in succession; (1) monotony: shades of grey; (2) factory

and office work; (3) the difficulties of living (loneliness and happiness); (4) love; (5) the sounds

of the world in summer, 1960; (6) on the road again.

Later on, once the editing had begun, Rouch and I would be interviewed by France

Observateur. This interview conveys our differences as well as our agreement, as evidenced in

the following extract:

******************************************************************************

Question: What is the importance of the editing of film, given that you have twenty-five hours of

rushes.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 475

JR: There's the crucial point! We are in conflict, Ed and I—a temporary and fruitful conflict, I

hope. My position is the following: The interest of this story is the film, it's the chronology and

evolution of the people as a function of the film. The subject itself is not very interesting. It is

difficult to bring together the testamonies, because they are often heterogeneous. There are

people who cheat a little, others not at all. To bring together their testimonies would be to falsify

the truth. I'll take a simple example: We asked people one question, among others: "What do you

think of your work?" Most of these people said they were bored in their jobs. The reasons they

give are very different: intellectual reasons, sentimental, physical reasons, etc. Bringing these

reasons together, in my opinion, is less interesting than the individuals their selves and finding

out the motives behind their responses. There are some marvelous contradictions certain scenes

of the film; sometimes people contradict themselves in a fantastic way. For example, Angélo, the

worker who has been let go by Renault is talking with Landry, the young African. Landry says to

him:

You're at Renault?... Ah, it's well known in Africa, the Renault Company! You don't see

anything else. 1,000 kilos, Dauphines . . ."

And all of a sudden Angélo, before even replying, breaks into a smile and says:

"Oh yeah? You've heard of the Renault Company?

It's inimitable!

So from the point of view of editing, my idea is the following: with some rare exceptions

it is almost impossible to upset the filming order. The people evolved in such a way that, if we

want to become attached to them, it is necessary to show them as a function of their evolution. In

fact the whole film was conceived that way. That's how I see the film. And that's why I center it

on the summer: it begins in spring and ends in autumn. It's the evolution of a certain number of
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 476

people throughout events which could have been essential but which were not. We thought in the

spring that the summer of 1960 would be essential for France. It wasn't, but even with this sort of

disappointment, this evolution is nonetheless, to my mind, the subject of the film.

So the editing that I am doing at present, which can, of course, be changed, is much more

a chronological editing as a function of the filming than editing as a function of the subject or of

the different subjects dealt with in the filming.

EM: I think that we must try to maintain in the editing a plurality. The great difficulty is

that there are in fact many themes. What I would like is to concentrate this collective halo around

the characters. In other words, I would not, in the end, like to see everything reduced to purely

individual stories, but rather there should be a dimension, not so much of the crowd, but of the

global problem of life in Paris, of civilization, and so forth.

What I would like is that at every moment we feel that the characters are neither "film

heroes" as in ordinary cinema nor symbols as in a didactic film, but human beings who emerge

from their collective life. What I would like is not to situate individualities as we see them in

normal films—in classical, fictional narrative films—where there are characters and some story

happens to those characters. I would like to talk about the individual characters in order to go on

to a more general problem and then come back from the general problem to the individual.

This means doing a sort of cinéma-vérité which would overcome the fundamental

opposition between fictional and documentary cinema. In fictional cinema, the private problems

of individuals are dealt with: love, passion, anger, hatred; in documentary film until now only

subjects external to the individual are dealt with: objects, machines, countrysides, social themes.

Jean and I agree at least on one point: that we must make a film that is totally authentic, as true
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 477

as a documentary but with the same concepts as fictional film, that is, the contents of subjective

life, of people's existence. In the end, this is what fascinates me.

Another thing that fascinates me on the theme of cinéma-vérité is not just reviving the

ideas of Dziga Vertov or things of that genre, but—and this is what is really new, from the

technical point of view, in what Jean has said—it is that cinéma-vérité can be an authentic

talking cinema. It is perhaps the first time that we will really end up with a sketch of talking

cinema. The words burst forth at the very moment when things are seen—which does not occur

with postsynchronization.

JR: In the empty Halles, when Marceline is talking about her deportation, she speaks in

rhythm with her step, she is influenced by the setting, and the way she is speaking is absolutely

inimitable. With postsynchronization and the best artist in the world, you would never be able to

achieve that unrelenting rhythm of someone walking in a place like that.

EM: In addition, it is a film where there are no fist fights, no revolver shots, not even any

kisses, or hardly any. The action, in the end, is the word. Action is conveyed by dialogues,

disputes, conversations What interests me is not a documentary which shows appearances, but an

active intervention to cut across appearances and extract from them their hidden or dormant

truths.

JR: Another extraordinary thing which you've forgotten, and that's understandable, is the

poetic discovery of things through the film. For example: a worker, Angélo, leaves the Renault

factory, takes the bus to go home, and gets off at Petit-Clamart. To get to his house he has to

climb up a stairway, an unbelievable stairway, and this ascent—after all it's only a worker on his

way home—becomes a sort of poetic drama.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 478

EM: Our common base is that neither one of us conceives of this film as merely

sociological or merely ethnographic or merely aesthetic, but really like a total and diffuse thing

which is at the same time a document, an experience lived by each person, and a research of their

contact.

******************************************************************************

Rouch proposes to me an alternate method of working: he'll start on his own to make a

preliminary selection of six to eight hours, head to tail, before he leaves for Africa in three

weeks. Then he leaves me to edit during his three-week absence. And so on, from confrontation

to confrontation, we will reach an agreement.

The Rouch-Dauman agreement on the editor-in-chief having not been achieved, we will

work with Nina Baratier, who has been taking care of the film since August, assisted by

Françoise Colin. Thus begins the first phase of editing.

Rouch comes up with a stringout of about seven hours. At the screening I see that many

sequences which I consider essential have been eliminated and that others which seem

uninteresting have been chosen. I feel as though everything is caving in. I, in turn, then take the

editing, reestablish some of the eliminated sequences, and eliminate some of those which Rouch

had retained, to end up with about four hours of screen time. Now Rouch is dissatisfied.

He takes over the editing, makes a four-hour version starting with the introduction of the

characters, and follows the chronology of the film in their wake. The introductions are

disappointing. I resume editing, and in a couple of days have a schema which starts with the "Are

you happy?"s, follows the theme of work, political problems (Algeria, the Cdngo), personal life,

to end up with a conclusion in which, in a few flash images, each of the characters expresses his

revolt. The last image: Angélo fighting alone with a tree. The screening is disappointing. On the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 479

way we have made concessions to each other; Rouch re-established some moments which were

important for me, I did not cut some moments that he is fond of.

Finally we reach an agreement on a compromise of principles. Compromise: the film will

not be a mosaic-type montage as I wanted it, made up of opposing sequences, sustained by the

guiding theme "How do you live?", nor will it be a biographico-chronological montage like

Rouch wanted. It will be something mixed, between the two. We agree on the fundamental

sequences which I, for my part, would like to include almost in their entirety, without condensing

them. I propose a compromise schema, abandoning the final montage on "resistance" and the

ultimate symbol of Angélo fighting with the tree, and adopting the three-part chronological

order: before vacation, the vacation, after vacation.

But by now the debate between Rouch and me is no longer taking place in private. Argos

Films intervenes, sometimes mistrusting Rouch and wanting to oversee his work (which he

refuses), at other times being enthusiastic over Rouch. According to these alternating attitudes,

Rouch is either a clumsy bricoleur or an inspired improviser. Dauman gives me no credit for my

capacities as neophyte editor but thinks at times that my contribution is efficient and at other

times that I am an abstract theoretician who is massacring the film. Dauman is sometimes

Rouchist, sometimes Morinist, quite often groans to see our combined incapacities, and is

constantly railing against Nina Baratier. In the beginning Nina Baratier sides sometimes with

Rouch and sometimes with me when it comes to eliminating scenes she doesn't like or keeping

ones she likes; in a second phase she thinks that Rouch and she deserve total confidence.

The successive versions were shown to different people, among whom Azar and Roger

Leenhardt would play a significant role. Argos wants Azar to be the editor of the film, but
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 480

Rouch, already at odds with me, wants to have a free hand. Azar formulates essentially the

following remarks:

1. What is extraordinary and unique for him are the moments when the faces in close-up

express some emotion. The moment when happiness erupts on Marilou's face is one of

the four moments in cinema which have most impressed him in his life. He also thinks

that the high points of the film consist of Jean-Pierre's monologue and Marceline on

August 15. Gabillon is moving. He doesn't like Angélo much; he finds him to be a ham.

2. Next to these sections, everything which is "cinema" is not only secondary but risks

killing the best parts. In any case, the section following the vacation segment is of no

interest. The film should end on a strong beat,- at the end of vacation. At the end of a

dramatic progression, we should finish with Marceline on August 15 and Marilou happy.

Leenhardt's remarks are different. The film must be intelligible: from the start the subject should

be clear, the problem plainly stated. In this sense he favors the introduction which Rouch is

proposing, the beginning of our first dialogue with Marceline, where we reveal our purpose.

There must also (and here Azar is going in the same direction) be a dialogue at the end of the

film which conveys the authors' conclusions.

The experimental screenings also bring out the fact that our few critical spectators believe

much more strongly in the truth of those scenes in which Rouch and I appear in front of the

camera, participating in the dialogue with our characters. They feel that the scenes in which we

do not appear, like the jetty at Saint Tropez, are "acted."

These remarks have some influence on us. We will maintain our presence in the picture,

which we had earlier had a tendency to eliminate (except when Rouch was considering making

me the "hero" of the film, off in search of the elusive grail). Rouch will retain his introduction
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 481

(the first dialogue with Marceline) but immediately afterward will come the "Are you happy?"

sequence. The conclusion will be our dialogue at the Musée de l'Homme (it is not until later that

this will be replaced by a new dialogue filmed subsequently). Rouch will come around slowly to

the idea of cutting the after-vacation, which satisfies me inasmuch as this gives more room for

the trial runs, which will take a central position. As for me, I will slowly accept the reduction of

the social-worker part and the suppression of any normative theme in the conclusion. We reach

an agreement on an editing plan.

As Rouch has to leave for Africa for a while, and as Dauman demands an editor, Rouch

chooses Ravel. For fifteen or twenty days Ravel works alone with Nina Baratier, following the

plan which we have established together, but having a fair amount of freedom of composition. I

will not intervene during this period except to insist on the need to make a quick edition in the

"Are you happy?" sequence. Ravel therefore edits the first half hour of the film in the present

order of succession (with the exception of the Landry- Angélo dialogue, Angélo 's dismissal, and

a few other modifications). Rouch and I will be satisfied.

Rouch comes back from Africa. He intervenes directly on the editing viewer and

immediately orients Ravel on the montage of the vacation sequences. The editing speeds up, a

copy must be ready for the Cannes festival, l defend my stand on the parts which I judge

essential, like the Algeria discussion, the discussion on the Congo and racism. Algeria poses

some particular difficulties: how to render the tumultuousness of this discussion and above all its

dramatic character when we must cut the passages which might be dangerous for our young

participants? How to avoid having the censors cut the scene completely? We also have many

discussions about the vacation sequence, but I leave the bullfight to Rouch (I would have kept

one minute or cut it entirely) and the little dialogue between Catherine and Landry about Saint
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 482

Tropez. The scene of Marceline and Jean-Pierre on the jetty is edited in the conventional cinema

style; it no doubt would have been better to show one long uninterrupted segment. Little by little

the postvacation sequences are eliminated or are aired before the vacation. We go on to the

mixing, and a copy is printed which is screened at Cannes.

This copy will not yet be the definitive version. The group discussion in the Studio

Publicis is not yet included, and there are still a few postvacation episodes, like Angélo’s

dismissal, Marilou's visit with her friend Jeanne, at home with her boyfriend, Marceline and

Jean-Pierre waking up.

The Publicis discussion had been abandoned along the way. I was not particularly

attached to it, Rouch having said that it was uneditable. But after Cannes, after a screening at the

Musée de l'Homme and at UNESCO, we feel that the end of this film is weak.

For me the weakness begins at the moment when we get to Algeria; for Rouch it is only

the end which needs work. He proposes to look at the screening of the Publicis discussion again,

and we are finally in total agreement on this point. It is absolutely necessary. At the same time

we eliminate the last postvacation element. A new discussion divides us on Marilou Happy,

which I think has been sabotaged in the edit-09, and we reestablish in part what I ask for.

However, we cannot retain the Marilou-Jeanne scene, which probably brings nothing to the film

but does show Marilou relaxed and cheerful. All we have left is to film a new conclusion, an

improvised dialogue at the Musée de l'Homme after the screening of the Publicis discussion and

taking into account (implicitly) the reactions of the first viewers. We are in the beginning of June

1961, one year after beginning "How do you live?" The film will definitely be called Chronique

d'un été even though the title does not reflect the subject. But Argos has decided it. "How do you

live?" is too TV, it seems. I leave for Chile on June 20. Finally we film a supplementary scene, a
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 483

last dialogue between Rouch and me at the Musée de l'Homme. On this occasion we used a

wireless microphone and therefore did not need to carry the shoulderbag tape recorder as we

walked. We were told that this conclusion scene was necessary. The day before filming it we

reviewed the final sequence of the group discussion at the Studio Publicis. Rouch and Ravel

finish editing the Studio Publicis part, the final discussion, and, with a few more modifications,

they put the definitive version of the film in order.18

Post-Chronique
"Chronicle of a Summer" is finished. It is already slipping away from us. Lately we are free to

add a postscript, for example, to take the unused film to make one or two supplementary films

which could be shown in ciné-clubs. Or maybe we could establish a long version (four hours),

again for the ciné-clubs or for private showings. Maybe we will do it, but the film is slipping

away from us, that is to say, we must accept it as is.

As for me, I am divided between two contradictory feelings. On the one hand, I feel

dissatisfaction in view of what I had ideally hoped for; on the other hand, I feel deep contentment

at having lived this experience, adhering to the compromise which such an accomplishment

presupposes. Without Rouch, the film would have been impossible for me, not only because it

was Rouch's name which convinced the producer to try the adventure, but also and above all

because his presence was indispensable for me, and there again not only from the technical point

of view, but also from the personal point of view. Though intellectually I can distinguish what

differentiates us, I cannot practically dissociate this curious pair we formed, like Jerry Lewis-

Dean Martin, Erckman¬Chatrian, or Roux-Combaluzier.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 484

We must also express our gratitude to Anatole Dauman. Thanks to Argos Film, Rouch

and I were able to carry out decisive experiments in our respective researches. It is thus

impossible to dissociate the "Argonauts" from cinéma-vérité.

This film, which is slipping away from us, now appears before critics and viewers. It

presents us once again with problems, indeed with new problems. These are not aesthetic

problems but questions more directly related to life. Because, unlike other films, the spectator is

not so much judging a work as judging other human beings, namely, Angélo, Marceline,

Marilou, Jean-Pierre, me, Rouch. They judge us as human beings, but in addition they attach this

moral or affective judgment to their aesthetic judgment. For example, if a spectator doesn't like

one of us, he will find that person stupid, insincere, a ham; he'll reproach the character for being

at the same time a bad actor and an unlikable individual. This confusion of levels at first upsets

us but reassures us at the same time, because it expresses the weakness and the virtue of this

film. It shows us that, no matter what, though we have been doing cinema, we have also done

something else: we have overflowed the bounds of cinema-spectacle, of cinema-theater, while at

the same time sounding the depths of its possibilities; we are also a part of this confused and

jumbled thing called life.

This film is a hybrid, and this hybridness is as much the cause of its infirmity as of its

interrogative virtue.

The first contradiction holds in the changeover from real time to cinematographic time.

Of course the real time is not the total time, since we were not filming all the time. In other

words, there was already a sort of selection in the filming; but the editing obliges us to make a

selection, a more difficult composition, more traitorous. We choose the times which we find the

most significant or the most powerful; of course, this theatricalizes life. On top of that, the close-
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 485

up accentuates dramatization. In fact there is more tension in seeing close-ups of Marilou,

Marceline, or Jean-Pierre than in being present in the scene itself, because the close-up of the

face concentrates, captures, fascinates. But above all we realize that though the editing can

improve everything that does not develop through the length of the film, it also weakens and

perverts the very substance of what happened in real time (the jetty at Saint Tropez, Marilou

unhappy, or Marceline on August 15, for example). Additionally, the compromise that Rouch

and I made on the characters works to their detriment. The viewer will not know them well

enough and yet will arrive at a global judgment on their personalities; they are sufficiently (i.e.,

too) individualized to avoid such judgment. Thus Jean-Pierre, Marilou, Marceline, Angélo,

Gabillon will be perceived globally by means of mere fragments of themselves.

These judgments, as in life, will be hasty, superficial, rash. I am amazed that what should

inspire esteem for Jean-Pierre or Marilou, namely, their admission of egoism or egocentrism

("egoism" for Jean-Pierre; "I reduce everything to my own terms" for Marilou) will

paradoxically produce a pejorative judgment of them. It seems we have underestimated the

hypocritical reaction, and as a result I tell myself that the real comedy, the real hamming, the

spectacle, takes place among the petty bourgeois who play at virtue, decency, health, and who

pretend to give lessons in truth.

But I must not let myself follow that miserable downslide of the human mind which

always transfers blame to others. Errors in judgment of which the characters in the film are

victims, are provoked because we both over- and underindividualized our characters; because

certain tensions whose origins are unclear emerge in the course of the film; because there is a

whole submerged dimension which will remain un-known to the public. Without intending to we

have created a projective test. We have only provided a few pieces of a puzzle that is missing
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 486

most of its parts. Thus each viewer reconstructs a whole as a function of his own projections and

identifications.

As a result, while this film was intended to involve the viewer, it involves him in an

unforeseen manner. I believed that the viewers would be involved if they asked themselves the

question "How do you live?" In fact the reactions are more diverse, and this diversity is not just

the diversity of aesthetic judgments: it is a diversity in attitudes toward others, toward truth,

toward what one has the right to say, and what one should not say.

This diversity marks our failure as well as our success. Failure, because we did not come

away with the sympathy of the majority, because, thinking we were clarifying human problems,

we provoked misunderstandings, even obscuring reactions. Success, because to a certain degree

Rouch and I gave these characters the chance to speak and because, to a certain degree, we gave

the public a liberty of appreciation which is unusual in cinema. We did not merely play the

divine role of authors who speak through the mouths of their characters and who show the public

the sentiments they should feel, their norms of good and bad. It is also because there is this

relative freedom, and not only because we filmed under the least cinemalike conditions possible,

that we have approached the cinema of life. But in approaching thus we have also approached all

the confusion of life.

We have also modified the relationship between actor and spectator, which is like the

relationship between an unseen God and a passive communicant. We have emerged from

mystery, we have shown our-selves, present, fallible, men among others, and we have provoked

the viewer to judge as a human being.

Whether or not we wanted it so, this film is a hybrid, a jumble, and all the errors of

judgment have in common the desire to attach a label to this enterprise and to confront it with
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 487

this label. The label "sociology": is this a film which (a) wants to be sociological, (b) is

sociological? Those for whom sociology signifies a survey of public opinion on a cross-section

sample of the population, that is to say, those who know nothing about sociology, say: we are

being tricked, this isn't a sociological film, the authors are dishonest. But we have in no way

presented this film under the label ethnographic or sociological. I also do not see why film critic

Louis Marcorelles denounces my "false sociological prestiges." I never introduce myself as a

sociologist, neither in the film nor in real life, and I have no prestige among sociologists. We

have not once, to my knowledge, pronounced the word "sociology" in this film. Our banner has

been "cinéma¬vérité" and I’ll get to that. Our enterprise is more diffuse, more broadly human.

Let's say in order to simplify things that we're talking about an enterprise that is both

ethnographic and existential: ethnographic in the sense that we try to investigate that which

seems to go without saying, that is, daily life; existential in that we knew that each per-son could

be emotionally involved in this research. Any filmmaker could have posed the question "How do

you live?", but we wanted this interrogation to be minimally sociological. This minimum is not

just an opinion poll, which not only achieves only superficial results when dealing with profound

problems, but also is totally inadequate for our enterprise. This minimum is first of all a

preliminary reflection on the sociology of work and daily life. Next it is an attitude which is

engraved in one of the fundamental lines of human sciences since Marx, Max Weber, and Freud.

To simplify: for Marx it is crisis which is revealing, not normal states. For Max Weber, a

situation is understood not by starting at a middle ground, but with extreme types (which Weber

constructed theoretically by the method of utopic realization and which he named "ideal types").

For Freud, the abnormal reveals the normal as one exacerbates that which exists in the latent or

camouflaged state of the other.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 488

If a good part of the film's viewers refuse, reject, or expel from themselves what they

consider a "pathological" case which is in no way representative or significant, this does not

indicate an error in our method, but rather the difficulties involved in consciousness of certain

fundamental givens of being human. The real question is not whether Marilou, Angélo,

Marceline, and Jean-Pierre are rare or exceptional cases, but whether or not they raise profound

and general problems, such as job alienation, the difficulty of living, loneliness, the search for

faith. The question is to know whether the film poses fundamental questions, subjective and

objective, which concern life in our society.

Psychoanalysis, therapy, modesty, risk: I have written that in certain conditions the eye of

the camera is psychoanalytical; it looks into the soul. Critics have reproached us for doing false

psychoanalysis, that is, of knowing nothing about psychoanalysis. Here we are dealing with a

myth of psychoanalysis, just as there is a myth of sociology. Psychoanalysis is a profession and a

doctrine with multiple tendencies, all strongly structured. Our venture is foreign to

psychoanalysis understood in its professional and structured sense but does go in the direction of

the ideas which psychoanalysis has helped to bring into focus. Otherwise, we have gambled on

the possibility of using cinema as a means of communication, and the therapeutic idea of our

plan is that all communication can be liberation. Of course I was aware, and am even more aware

since the film has been screened, of all the difficulties of communication, the boomerang risks of

malevolent interpretations or of scornful indifference; I know that those I wanted recognized

were sometimes disregarded. I know that if l were to do it again, I would do it differently, but I

also know that I would do it. And I reaffirm this principle: things which are hidden, held back,

silenced, must be spoken; J. J. Rousseau is worth more than Father Dupanloup; Lady Chatterly's
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 489

Lover is worth more than the censure which prohibited it. We suffer more from silencing the

essential than from speaking.

The need to communicate is one of the greatest needs which ferments in our society; the

individual is atomized in what Riesman has called "the lonely crowd." In this film there is an

examination of stray, clumsy communication, which our censors have called exhibitionism or

shamelessness. But where is the shame? Certainly not in those who make themselves the crude

and ostentatious spokesmen of shame: shame does not have such impudence.

But finally one question is asked: Do we have the right to drag people into such an

enterprise? I will answer that it is first a matter of characterizing this enterprise, that is to say, the

risks it involves. Is it an enterprise of vivisection or poisoned psychoanalysis? Or is it, on the

contrary, a game of no importance? Does it involve the same sort of risks as taking passengers in

a car on vacation roads or leading an expedition into a virgin forest? How can they judge the

harmful consequences, those who know neither Marilou, Angélo, nor the others? Having thought

it all out, I'd say that the greatest risk depends on those who criticize Angélo, Marilou, etc.; that

is to say, their inability to love them. Of course we exposed Angélo, Marilou, Marceline, and

Jean-Pierre to this risk because we overestimated the possibilities of friendship. But even in the

case of Marilou and of Jean-Pierre, unknown friends are born to them.

In the end, anyone who lives with a woman, has children, recruits adherents to his party,

whoever lives and undertakes anything makes others take risks. Each of us risks the destiny of

others in the name of their interests and their morals. The ultimate problem is that of each of our

own morals.

Bourgeois or revolutionary film? This film is infrapolitical and infrareligious. There is a

whole zone left unexplored by the film. If we had been believers we would not have neglected
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 490

belief. On the political level the question is different. We did not want, for example, to present

the worker problem at the level of political or union affiliations or of salary claims, because

conditions of industrial work should be questioned at a deeper, more radical level. Taking into

account this infrapoliticism, we were the only ones in filmmaking to question the war in Algeria

and to thus attack the central political problem of the hour.

It was possible to judge this film variously reactionary or revolutionary, bourgeois or

leftist. I don't want to get dragged into defining right now what I understand by reactionary,

bourgeois, left; nor to polemicize with those who find the film reactionary. I would say only that

the meaning of the film is clear if one conceives of it as contesting both the reigning values of

bourgeois society and Stalinist or pseudoprogressive stereotypes.

Optimism? Pessimism?

It is true that Rouch was naturally carried toward what is cheerful and light and that he

was the spokesman of "life is beautiful," while I was naturally carried toward what is sad or

sorrowful. The reason for my quest to approach the difficulties of living is not just that happy

people have no story to tell, but also because there are fundamental problems which are tragic,

ponderous, and which must be considered. But to confront these problems is not to despair. What

disheartens me, on the contrary, is that everyone who is not subjected to the piecework without

responsibility or initiative, that is, typical of the laborer or the civil servant, readily takes it for

granted. What disheartens me are those people resigned to the artificial, shabby, frivolous life

which is given to them well defined. What disheartens me are those who make themselves

comfortable in a world where Marceline, Marilou, Jean-Pierre, and Angélo are not happy.

That these may be "my" problems, that my problems should have taken form in this film

(at least in an elementary fashion), does not mean that they cease to exist independently of me.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 491

That I may have difficulties in life, that I may not really be able to adapt, this does not

necessarily mean that I cannot step outside of myself; it may also sensitize me to the problems of

others. In any case I drew two "optimistic" lessons from this experience. First, an increased faith

in adolescent virtues: denial, struggle, and seeking. In other words, Angélo, Jean-Pierre, Marilou,

and Marceline have inspired me to resist the bourgeois life. The second is the conviction that

every time it is possible to speak to someone about essential things, consciousness is awakened,

man awakens. Everyone, the man in the street, the unknown, hides within himself a poet, a

philosopher, a child. In other words, I believe more than ever that we must relentlessly deal with

the person, denying something in the person, revealing something in the person.

Cinéma-Vérité?

Finally we come to the problem of cinéma-vérité. How do we dare speak of a truth that

has been chosen, edited, provoked, oriented, deformed? Where is the truth? Here again the

confusion comes from those who take the term cinéma-vérité as an affirmation, a guarantee

sticker, and not as a research.

Cinéma-vérité: this means that we wanted to eliminate fiction and get closer to life. This

means that we wanted to situate ourselves in a lineage dominated by Flaherty and Dziga Vertov.

Of course this term cinéma-vérité is daring, pretentious; of course there is a profound truth in

works of fiction as well as in myths. At the end of the film the difficulties of truth, which had not

been a problem in the beginning, became apparent to me. In other words, I thought that we

would start from a basis of truth and that an even greater truth would develop. Now I realize that

if we achieved anything, it was to present the problem of the truth. We wanted to get away from

comedy, from spectacles, to enter into direct contact with life. But life itself is also a comedy, a

spectacle. Better (or worse) yet: each person can only express himself through a mask, and the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 492

mask, as in Greek tragedy, both disguises and reveals, becomes the speaker. In the course of the

dialogues each one was able to be more real than in daily life but at the same time more false.

This means that there is no given truth that can simply be deftly plucked, without

withering it (this is, at the most, spontaneity). Truth cannot escape contradictions, since there are

truths of the unconscious and truths of the conscious mind; these two truths contradict each

other. But just as every victory carries its own defeat, so every failure can bring its own de-feat.

If the viewer who rejects the film asks himself "Where is the truth?", then the failure of "How do

you live?" is clear, but maybe we have brought out a concern for the truth. No doubt this film is

an examination whose emphasis has been misplaced. The fundamental question that we wanted

to pose was about the human condition in a given social setting and at a given moment in history.

It was a "How do you live?" which we addressed to the viewer. Today the question comes from

the viewer who asks "Where is the truth?" If for a minority of viewers the second question does

not follow the first, then we have both supplied something and received something. Something

which should be pursued and thoroughly investigated. To live without renouncing something is

difficult. Truth is long-suffering.

Notes
1. Reprinted from Visual Communications, 11 (1), Morin, E., Chronicle of a film, 4-29.,

Copyright (1985), with permission from Sage Publications, Inc.

2. NOTE: Unless otherwise indicated, all footnotes in this article were written by Jean

Rouch.

3. The French is “pris sur le vif” - ED.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 493

4. In fact it seems to me that the “camera-eye” experiments by Dziga Vertov and his friends

ran up against equipment which was too heavy and difficult to handle. The camera in the

street was visible to those it filmed, and this seemed to the authors to invalidate its

results. Since then both technical manageability and people’s reactivity to the camera

have evolved considerably. We must also mention Jean Vigo, who’s À propos de Nice is

quite a fascinating endeavor.

5. This image of the filmmaker-diver always pleased (and flattered) me. The filmmaker

with his equipment does indeed look like a deep-sea diver or like an interstellar voyager,

but one who navigates in a “nonsilent" world.

6. The Hunters, produced by the team of the Film Center of the Peabody Museum (Harvard

University), comprised of John Marshall, Professor Brew, and Robert Gardner.

7. The French is "cinema de fraternité'' - ED

8. This notion of the play of truth and life before the camera, pointed out by Edgar in 1959-

1960, is a capital one. Starting, no doubt, at the moment when Edgar sensed it in the

drafts presented in Florence, it has been possible to pursue this play, no longer with only

men who are alien to our culture (thus exotic to the spectator), but with men of our

culture (thus brothers to the spectator). From this contact in Florence came the experience

of Chronique d’un été.

9. At the beginning, this fine meal idea was destined more than anything to satisfy the

demonic gourmandise of Morin, thus to get him in the mood for conversation. In fact, it

allowed a feeling of trust to develop among the actors and the crew, which was

indispensable for suppressing inhibitions before the camera (always present and ready to

record at any moment).

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 494

10. This is one of the major obstacles in this cinema based on complete improvisation. When

we do not film a scene as a result of carelessness or when the filming fails for technical

reasons, the new takes are never as good as the original. We eliminated all of them in the

final editing. (In La Pyramide humaine I also suffered terribly from this difficulty; certain

remade scenes had to be kept; these are the worst in the film.)

11. I was behind the camera during this scene. We were then using an Arriflex camera with

an enormous soundproof case ("blimp"). Morillère was at my side, holding focus. When

Marilou spoke of suicide, the silence which followed was so necessary that no one spoke.

Morillère and I exchanged a glance, which meant ''we won't stop," and when Morin

finally broke the silence, everyone breathed again.

12. It was a gamble, we lost. Indeed in the summer of 1960 was to represent for us an

essential moment in the history of France and to show the repercussions of this adventure

on the heroes already associated with our enterprise seemed to me to become the

principle subject of the film. Nothing remains of this except for the Algeria-Congo

discussion and the title, Chronique d’un été.

13. Though all this Saint Tropez period was terribly depressing for Edgar, who felt

threatened by the fiction of psychodramas, it was terribly exciting for Michel Brault and

me, as we invented our new tools. We came back from Lausanne, whore Stephan

Kudelski, inventor of the Nagra tape recorder, excited by the enthusiasm of Michel Fano

(sound engineer), Michel Brault, and me, let us glimpse the cinema which was to be born

a year later. Marilou's dreams, fake encounters in the plane and the train, the false B. B.

—these were as much experiments in synchronous sound filming in a plane, on a train, in

a crowd. etc.: the first in the world and since much imitated.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 495

14. “Les Agriculteurs” was a movie theatre known for screening experimental and innovative

films. The scene mentioned here in included in the filmscript that follows; it does not

appear in English subtitled prints of the film circulated in the United States.-ED

15. To my mind, this scene is one of the most beautiful in the film, along with the one of

Marceline on August 15 (of which this is the opposite). We made the error in editing, of

trying to condense it (it lasted almost half an hour in the rushes), respecting a certain

cinematographic language (changes of angles between different shots).

16. The “serment du jeu de paume” was sworn on June 20, 1789, by the deputies of the Third

Estate not to separate after giving a constitution to France. Because the king prohibited

access to the Salle des Menus Plaisirs where they usually met, they went to the nearby

Jeu de Paume – ED

17. In fact, I felt the same anguish over the making of Chronique that I had earlier felt with

Moi, un noir and La Pyramide humaine, that of amputation. This is, no doubt, the greatest

stumbling block of all these improvised films, with no scenario or preplanned continuity;

to reduce to one hour thirty minutes an enormous body of material whose value is its

authenticity, that is, the length, the hesitations, the awkwardnesses. In a film shot in

silence, like Moi, un noir, the problem is already difficult; in a film shot with direct

sound, like Pyramide and Chronique, it's an incredible headache knew only one effective

method of approach, successive approximations which alone allow us to "see" the film

reduced to a human screening time. This was my greatest fear about having one editor-in-

chief who would rethink the film.

18. I see that Edgar has slightly exaggerated the oppositions we faced in his chronicle of

Chronique. "Co-authoring" is not simple teamwork where the two partners agree. It is a
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 496

more violent game where disagreement is the only rule, and the solution lies in the

resolution of this disagreement It is also necessary for the arbiter (or the producer) to

have an open enough mind to follow the game while sanctioning its only faults. Alas, a

film producer, caught between patronizing intolerable artists and financial imperatives,

cannot be impartial.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 497

Chapter 21: The Multidimensional Method1

The principle of the method employed in Plodémet2 is to encourage the flow of concrete data, to

capture human realities on various levels, to bring out and reveal the features of the terrain, to

begin with the sociological individual, which is a commune, AND to recognize the original

features of the double nature, unique and microcosmic, of the phenomenon studied.

Interpretation and research cannot be separated in time. The corpus of hypotheses cannot

be established once and for all, but must be capable of development and modification as the

inquiry develops techniques of investigation. In short, it is a question of finding rigor, not in

rigidity but in a strategy of permanent adaptation.

This means that the standard method used in inquiries is not only inadequate but

distorting. It seeks verification by means of a questionnaire addressed to a sample of the

population.

The instrument of verification, the questionnaire, is as insensitive to the various concrete

features of a local society as it is to sociological multidimensionality. Above all, the standard

inquiry reduces the true research to the pre-inquiry phase when hypotheses are formulated,

methods worked out, and a sample of the population picked. From then on, the inquiry refuses

any retraction, correction, or innovation. The phase of collecting the questionnaires is an

intellectually passive one. Thought comes back into its own only later.

We therefore abandoned initial programming and the use of a questionnaire, though we

did not preclude the possibility of using one as a final check.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 498

We retained the use of the sampling method, as a population of 3,700 is too large for a

direct house-to-house study. We built up the sample in the course of the inquiry in such a way as

to respect the special problems of the terrain.

The Means of Investigation

An investigation must encourage the flow of concrete data, and therefore it must be

flexible enough to include on-the-spot-documentation (descriptions of actual events, tape-

recorded discussions, conversation with a minimum of direction).

It must capture the various dimensions of the phenomenon studied and make use of

different approaches.

It must be capable of correction and verification in the development of an interpretation.

The variety of approaches allows a confrontation and concentration of means on CERTAIN

points of verification.

We made particular use of the following:

1. Phenomenographic observation (which is related to methods in use in ethnography but

neglected by standard sociology).

2. The interview.

3. Participation in group activities (social praxis).

Phenomenographic Observation
The investigation should be applied as much to the various centers of social life as to the

individual household. It should be complemented by other methods of investigation, but remain

autonomous. Ideally, it should cover the totality of the objective, including the observer in the act

of observing.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 499

It should try to be both panoramic (capturing the whole of the visual field) and analytic

(distinguishing each element in the visual field).

The visual sense is so atrophied among sociologists who depend on the questionnaire and

the tape recorder, or conversely on unsupported speculation, that they must learn to observe

facts, gestures, dress, objects, landscapes, houses, lanes. We believe in the need for a Balzac-like

and Stendhal-like approach in sociology.

The Balzac-like approach is encyclopedic description; the Stendhal-like, that of the

“significant detail.” To these should be added a sense of the sociological snapshot.

As the terrain becomes intelligible, the mass of accumulated documentation becomes a

breeding ground in which data are transformed into signs, and in which detail becomes less and

less incidental and more and more rewarding.

The qualities needed in observation are those needed in inquiry as a whole: an interest

equally sustained in general ideas, concrete realities, and men and women in their uniqueness.

The purely professional attitude, on the other hand, atrophies perception; a monomaniacal

interest in a single idea distorts that idea; indifference to human beings is blindness; indifference

to ideas blinds one to the proliferation of signs of which the phenomenal world is composed; an

inadequate capacity to interpret leads to an inadequate capacity to perceive, and vice versa.

Each researcher recorded his/her observations in a personal diary, which was not an

accumulation of notes but a narrative that led off itself to the recall of a series of unconsciously

recorded facts.3 The diary, complemented by subjective accounts of impressions and feelings,

provides the external eye—which may be the second sight of the observer himself—with

material that can assist in the elucidation of the observer-phenomenon relationship. This subject-

object relationship is the key to any effort at being objective in research.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 500

The Interview
Interviews were used throughout the inquiry, and it was for this purpose that we built up

a population sample based on the usual categories.

The choice of interviewees was made (1) by chance (and throughout the inquiry we left

room for chance); (2) by scanning diverse areas (Menez-Ru, Kéravrez, Bravez, Kerminou); and

(3) by systematic selection.

In the case of villages, groups, and individuals, the criterion of choice was not average

representativeness, as in the method of quotas or random selection, but maximum significance.

We looked for extreme cases that would allow the formation of typological poles of opposition

(young-old, modernist-traditionalist, bourgeois-rustic). We looked for subjects that were

experiencing the crucial conflicts most closely (in Plodémet, these conflicts are linked to the

development of modernity which constitutes the activists, initiators, and not only Lazarsfeld's

“leaders of opinion”. The search included deviants, passive or rebellious; and, of course, key

persons occupying socially strategic positions, and those at the center of multiple

communications.

According to opportunity and circumstances, we made use of pseudo-conversation, the

limited interview (asking a limited number of open questions that could be used in all fields), and

in-depth interviews.

The function of the in-depth interview is to reveal the personality, basic needs, and view

of life of the interviewee. Our great problem was to guide the interview toward areas of non-

directivity. We tried to confine our own role to that of initiating by intuition rather than by

preconceived rules. In fact, patience and sympathy, not technique and skill, were the factors of

success.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 501

The interview succeeded from the moment the interviewee’s speech was freed of

inhibition and embarrassment and became communication.

It was usually after one to two hours that the struggle between inhibition and exhibition

was resolved to the advantage of extrovert forces.4

It appeared to us that the interviewee was fully satisfied with having talked to us only

when he could himself ask questions, either to get to know the observer or to learn something

from a “scientist”. On our side, we felt embarrassed at making the interview a captive operation.

The fact of having an interviewee who disliked letting himself be manipulated and an interviewer

who disliked manipulating drove us to introduce dialogue as the final stage of the interview.

The interview, regarded as drudgery by sociologists and market researchers, was for us

one of the essential means of communication. These “dives”, with tape recorder as oxygen tank

and microphone as harpoon, led us to the secret dimension of lives that seemed two-dimensional

at first sight.

Groups and Praxis

What we have retained from Marxism (which we assimilated and integrated in

anthroposociology) makes us attentive to the social praxis, to the reality and action of social

groups. Action not only reveals realities that rarely reach the level of verbal expression and

consciousness, but it is also the dynamic reality of social life.

Through the methods of investigation outlined above, we were able to access groups in

an indirect way only, but when possible we did so directly through professional, political,

ideological, religious, and other bodies. We tried to discover the conflicts and tensions they

aroused in action: in the case of the youth club, internal class conflicts, tensions with adults,

difficulties in relations with teachers, the municipality, the clergy.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 502

Within the social praxis, on-the-spot events or on-the-spot reactions to external events

provided us with spontaneous social tests. Land redistribution (1961-1966), for example, was

regarded as a great multipurpose test of peasant life and consciousness in Plodémet.

In addition to observation, we also introduced test situations, like showing the film The

Wild Ones to the teenagers, or the plan for a holidays committee, which we proposed to different

social groups. As observers of group behavior, we were sometimes led to intervene as purveyors

of information and even as advisers. Our experience with the provoked tests and the youth

committee brought us to the conclusion that intervention should be a necessary method of

research. We used the basic idea of interventionist psychosociology, that of action-research, but

without confining ourselves to the precepts of any particular school. Our principles of

intervention were the following:

1. The maieutic principle. We were led to intervene when we thought we detected a

situation pregnant with change or innovation.

2. The nondirective principle. Our intervention had to be catalytic. It could initiate

movement, but not fix its norms and program. It could help, but not orient.

3. The principle of primitive experimentation (test situations or paraexperimental

situations).

4. The principle of psychosociological “Socratism”. The intervention must lead those

involved to reflect on their principal problems.

5. The principle of utility, common to both research workers and their subjects.

We caught only a glimpse of the possibilities and difficulties; the youth club, however

moderate its disturbing effect on the commune may appear to have been, presented us with a
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 503

problem in responsibility and prudence. The possibilities: Once envisaged the formation of

“general sociological states” in which the various groups of Plodémet society would be led to

formulate and compare their aspirations and needs.

Intervention needs a policy that goes beyond the framework of immediate utility for the

group under study. A norm should be conceived that should not necessarily be the reduction of

tensions and conformity to the general norm.

Subjectivity and Objectivity

Our method seeks to envelop the phenomenon (observation), to recognize the forces

within it (praxis), to provoke it at strategic points (intervention), to penetrate it by individual

contact (interview), to question action, speech, and things.

Each of these methods poses a fundamental methodological problem: the relationship

between the research worker and the subject.

It is not merely a subject-object relationship. The “object” of the inquiry is both object

and subject, and one cannot escape the intersubjective character of all relations between humans.

We believe that the optimal relationship requires, on the one hand, detachment and

objectivity in relation to the object as object, and on the other, participation and sympathy in

relation to the object as subject. As this object and subject are one, our approach must be a dual

one.

In most of our methods, a lack of sympathy would be a grave limitation to

communication. We tried to overcome this limitation by using the technique of drinking together

and eating together. Drinking together is necessary everywhere, and especially so in Plodémet.

The buvette is a forum, a center of comradeship. In Bigoudennie, a man who drinks well is

accepted as a naturalized Breton. Eating together is an occasion of warmth. Unfortunately, I was

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 504

not able to carry my efforts in this direction far enough. On the one hand, my digestion still

suffers the effects of such previous research into human communication, and on the other,

financial disbursers appear not to realize that expenses for entertainment are a sociological

investment.

Apart from these friendly encounters, our immersion in the life of Plodémet by virtue of

our extended residence there (adoption of customs and sometimes participation in work) was

also a subjective immersion. Our sympathy with the future development of Plodémet not only

made us wish to assist in this development, but also made us, in a sense, naturalized citizens of

Plodémet.

The scientifically indispensable dissociation between observation and participation is an

intellectual divorce which does not exclude affective participation. Yet participation requires a

sustained and permanent effort of distancing and objectification. The researcher must constantly

elucidate what he feels and reflect on his experience. He cannot escape his internal duality.

Moreover, this duality must be apparent to the subject-object of the inquiry. The fact that he

carries a tape recorder with him wherever he goes designates him in his objective capacity as a

“scientist”, while daily contact shows him to be a human being like everyone else. In fact, he

must be both practitioner and friend. He must be like everyone else and also the possessor of

special knowledge, like a priest and a doctor. The art of sociological inquiry is to experience this

dual personality internally and express it externally, to dialectically enrich participation and

objectification. We do not claim to have succeeded, but we do claim that it is necessary to

attempt to do so.

In one sense, the subject remains an inaccessible object; this is reflected on the part of the

research worker in a cynical desire to know. This is why we must counter-balance this cynicism
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 505

with a device to obtain the flow of everything that is IN the nature of a confidence, or exchange.

Exchange is our key value, although it does not settle our problem of dual responsibility to

knowledge and to those whom we are studying.

The Research Workers

Standard inquiries take elaborate technical precautions about obtaining their data,

forgetting that this also depends on who is obtaining them. We paid more attention to the

personal qualities of the workers we recruited than to their technical qualifications. The

multidimensional method requires a curiosity open to all dimensions of the human phenomenon

and the full use of varied aptitudes. Each worker is versatile in that he must practice observation,

interview, and group action, and be a specialist in whatever sector suits him best.

We had to struggle against too great a need for mental security on the part of the young

workers who expected schemata and programs drawn up in advance, work that might be boring

but easy to separate from the rest of one’s life, or an assurance at the outset of the validity of the

method of analysis and of the theoretical value of our final conclusions. They were disturbed by

the freedom of initiative they were given. The open attention to facts struck them as

“impressionistic”; the open attention to ideals as “experimental”. They failed to see that these

impressions and experiments as well as errors of intelligence, must be used, criticized, and

integrated, not rejected. They understood the method only when they began to feel personally

involved in the work.

Curiously enough, the resistance to the full expression of sociological aptitudes among

young research workers is a result of their sociological vocation, serving as a religious

conversion rather than an elucidation of consciousness. In such cases, devotion to objectivity is

too closely linked to the repression of a guilty subjectivity. Mathematical order and ambitious
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 506

intellectual structures exorcise the disorder of the world as well as internal disorders. Their

mistrust of their own subjectivity leads them to mistrust their professional gifts.

Development of the Inquiry

The research developed in successive stages, which we called “campaigns”. In 1965,

there were six campaigns, separated by periods of methodological elaboration or correction,

examination of collected data, criticism of the methods used, re-examination of hypotheses, and

the drawing up of strategy for the next campaign—the sectors and populations to be studied and

the problem to elucidate.

Within each campaign, the day-to-day orientation and regulation of our work was assured

by our presence and participation in the field, by meetings of the research team, and by the

intercommunication of the inquiry diaries, including my own.

By means of innumerable day-to-day confrontations, an overall control was established

whereby norms could be laid down, dissipation of effort avoided, and errors corrected. Control

and progressive focalization gradually reduced the element of error in the inquiry (but the

principle of keep a door open to the unexpected was maintained to the end).

Thus the constant effort to elucidate a social personality is designed to isolate the

subject’s uniqueness and understand its metabolism, and to see it as a microcosm of the social

macrocosm.

Is it paradoxical to claim that the more particular a study should be, the more general it

should be?

Without a general constitutive model that is both complex and articulated, one does little

more than carry out a census that would be inadequately catalogued in any case by schemata
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 507

based ultimately on private ideological commonplaces and the journalistic ideas of the specialists

themselves.

The constitutive model examined here is that of a French society, but it is not a strictly

national model; it is the French variant of a Western model, and more broadly still, of a

technological, industrial, capitalist, urban, bourgeois, wage-earning, statist, consumptionist

civilization whose fundamental dimensions must be articulated, rather than largely excluded in

the manner of single-dimensional minds.

In order to articulate our constitutive model, we had to historicize our study of Plodémet.

We had to study the past (and here previous historical research was most valuable), and above

all, at the level of our own research, we postulated space in relation to time. We wished to situate

the data we collected in relation to evolution.

This led us to elaborate a multidimensional battery of indicators of modernity in relation

to a tradition; thus enabling us to use as much as possible the oppositions of generations as

indices of transformation; and finally, to use the heterogeneities of the terrain as temporal

landmarks. Thus Menez-Ru, a backward village, and Kerminou, a highly advanced hamlet,

helped us to chart a whole process. Inequality of development is the spatiotemporal notion that

enabled us to transmute space into time and to integrate change into space.

In concentrating our work on the elucidation of the personality of Plodémet, we remained

at the crossroads of space and time; we tried to encapsulate this tiny society within its own future

and its relation to the general future.

Finally, the question “What is Plodémet?” implied the question “What is the modem

world?” It was this dual and inevitable question that we tried to press as far as possible.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 508

Notes
1. The Multidimensional Method" from RED AND THE WHITE by Edgar Morin,

copyright ©1970 by Random House, Inc. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an

imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House

LLC. All rights reserved.

2. Plodémet is a French coastal township on the Atlantic Ocean in Brittany where in 1964

Morin and a team of scholars undertook multidisciplinary research funded by the

Délégation Générale à la Recherche Scientifique et Technique. Morin examined the

impact of modernization on Plodémet while also writing more generally about France.

Morin describes the research and findings in his book The Red and the White: Report

from a French Village. AHC

3. These diaries have been published: Morin, E. (2001). Journal de Plozevet. Paris: Editions

de l’Aube. AHC

4. We had the good fortune to study an open, good-natured, curious population, which

helped us to gain access to the need for communication that exists in most human beings.

Communication was helped by having the interview take place in the home of the

interviewee, in the presence of two or three research workers. The participants were able

in this way to help each other get over their nervousness. The tape recorder is both the

“spy” that sets up inhibition and the microphone that arouses the desire to communicate

and gives the interviewee a stronger sense of personal existence. The art of the interview

is to overcome inhibitions and to appeal to the interviewee’s need to communicate. We

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 509

have examined some of these problems In “L’interview dans les sciences sociales et la

radio-télévision,” Communications, 7, 1966, pp. 59-73.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 510

Chapter 22: The Principles of 'Contemporary

Sociology'
There is a clear antithesis between our own sociological technique, as exemplified here,

and that associated with strict specialisation, which—despite its regularity of method, and

reliance on statistics—never succeeds in achieving the degree of scientific verification which

makes experimental work possible. Our approach concentrates on the phenomenon rather than

on any concept of discipline; it concerns itself less with variable factors than with the event as

such, and is more interested in a crisis than in regular statistical patterns. The antithesis can

likewise be traced, not only on the plane of empirical methodology (where we tend to accord

priority to observation and intervention), but also on that of epistemology and general theory.

Here we tend to concentrate our efforts, not in the multidisciplinary field, or on so-called

structural formalisation, but rather on a type of phenomenal logic (the structured study of social

phenomena in their own time-and-place context). At the theoretical level this must be meshed in

with an anthropo-socio-historical system. At this level (as we make very clear) the antithesis

between our concept and the rest becomes complementary. What we advocate is a

multidimensional grasp of phenomena, which forces itself to assimilate the findings of all

disciplines and all methods. It follows that we do not sense reject statistics or the use of

questionnaires. We simply refuse to let sociology become bogged down by them.

The Phenomenon
A phenomenon is that which appears which emerges into social reality, as a relatively isolable

datum (or group of data). It may be, e.g. an institution, a town, an opinion-trend, a myth, a

fashion, and so on. The strict categorising approach cuts a section through any phenomenon,

describes the angle from which it is to be studied; in a sense by so doing it disintegrates the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 511

phenomenon in question, since the latter can be, at one and the same time, geographical,

historical, economic, sociological, religious, psychological and much besides in its implications.

Furthermore, the main point of setting up multi- or inter-disciplinary teams is for the better

understanding of phenomena as such. We believe this process should be taken still further. It is

vital to break away from the disciplinary big battalions, to envisage new special fields, to

cultivate polycentricity and certain types of anti-specialisation (over-specialisation, in the

evolution of living species as in that of science, is a deadly peril) that facilitate adherence to the

two polarisations brought about by any study of phenomena—i.e. on the one hand specific

concrete data, and on the other, speculative theory. It is, moreover, no accident that the sociology

which prevails today lies in a 'middle range' between theory and facts, being poor in one and

liable to mutilate the other. Our task then, beginning from the phenomenological impulse, is to

breathe some life into theory and facts alike, both of which have suffered conjointly from

atrophy, under-development, and suppression.

Furthermore, the sociological approach now in fashion is well aware of the need for a

phenomenal substratum, if only to give interpretative direction to those working models,

equations and general or relative patterns which it finds itself driven to extrapolate. With this in

mind it pounced eagerly on the concept of industrial society (or civilisation), which it set up as a

kind of diptych with the notion of traditional society (or civilisation), cheerfully lumping whole

millennia of complex history together in this all-embracing terminological category. Today it has

hastened to add a third panel, that of post-industrial society (or civilisation); but this speculative

phenomenological triptych is very thin stuff.

In our view, contemporary society (or civilisation) is a multi-conditioned complex, in

which to retain the industrial determinant as one's sole essential criterion strikes us as a wholly
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 512

arbitrary process. Furthermore, this economically orientated concept either suppresses, or

discards as irrelevant to sociology, various conflicts, crises, and events which might well shed

some light on the inner nature of this world we now inhabit.

The Event or Happening

Sociology reduces a phenomenon to the restrictive level of industrial (or post-industrial) society,

circumscribes the concrete particular in descriptive monographs, and simply eliminates the

event, as such, altogether.

An event, or happening, is regarded as something accidental, contingent, which must be

set aside if we are to appreciate the true social realities, these being associated with repetition,

regularity and, more often than not, with structural pattern.

We believe; however, that an event must be treated, first and foremost, as informative

evidence—i.e. as a new element which not only infiltrates the sociologist's mental outlook, but

affects his social assumptions as well.

Even if we restrict ourselves to a strictly cybernetic model of social life, the event-as-

information is precisely what enables us to understand the nature of the system's structure and

functioning; it is, in fact, a kind of feedback, a process by which information is assimilated (or

rejected),and modifications brought about—either in the system, or by it.

To make a biological analogy; the event is that stress or disturbance which triggers of

rebalancing processes in an organism. This may be achieved either by repression/ annihilation, or

by integration/evolution—that is, by modification and change.

Thus the event constitutes an active test of any system in which it intervenes; and,

furthermore, it enables us to approach a problem which—whether looked at theoretically or

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 513

phenomenologically—is of prime importance for the scientific knowledge of every society, and

above all for those in the modern world: that of change.

In point of fact, after we have eliminated, as a matter of course, those events which

follow a statistically regular pattern (e.g. suicides, car accidents, delinquency), we find that the

rest do intervene, decisively and over a wide spectrum, in human history. This applies equally to

events that are originally outside the pattern of social life (e.g. natural cataclysms, climatic

changes, etc.); social in origin, but external to the society under consideration (invasions, acts of

aggression, wars); and internal to a given society (political events, social conflicts or crises).

These two latter types of event are so important that they are what gives society its

distinctive historical character. The implication, from our point of view, is that we must not

allow ourselves to pick and choose in the field of social reality, emphasising only 'balanced

systems' and ignoring the rest. Such systems should be regarded merely as 'utopian

rationalisations'—to borrow a neat, and still not fully appreciated, phrase of Max Weber's—that

is, as useful instruments, but not to be taken literally or regarded as 'true' models of social reality.

The latter, when set against these pseudo-models, reveals rather more of a functional-

dysfunctional syndrome. It consists of a permanent dialectic between those factors which tend

towards the establishment of balanced systems, and counter-tendencies liable to disrupt the

equilibrium thus attained. This dialectic—the source of all modifications, whether evolutive or

involutive (the latter, in their own way, evolutive too)—is effectively shaped by events, which

present themselves to us, partly as enigmatic messages, and partly as warnings: that is, as

significant revelations.

We are still only at the beginnings of an occurrential sociology. Here I would just like to

raise two points which may be of some methodological interest. Firstly, the attention given (as
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 514

already stated) to those processes of modification and resorption provoked by the event.

Secondly, the attention given to the triggering off of other events or new processes through a

synchronisation of dynamic forces hitherto independent but now brought into juxtaposition,

and/or adjusted to the same wavelength as various isomorphisms that had remained latent only so

long as these heterogeneous distinctions were maintained. Thus, the student riots of 3 May 1968

immediately synchronised and stimulated certain competitive, quasi- sporting tendencies present

or latent in various categories of adolescent (high-school students, young workers, those on the

verge of manhood); it activated various juvenile isomorphisms, while the corresponding

heteromorphisms entered on a period of latency. In their second phase, and in a still more

remarkable manner from the viewpoint of the 'contemporary sociologist', the student riots (this

time involving young workers as well) both synchronised and activated an isomorphic opposition

between those who submit to authority and those who exercise it. This phenomenon lasted for

several weeks, despite differences in background and every other sort of heterogeneous

discrepancy.

The study of what we may term `occurrential virulence'—the violent, exaggerated outburst in

any form—cannot be kept separate from the ordinary processes of communication associated

with events per se, and the symbolic indeed the mythological characteristics they acquire as soon

as they enter the social communications-system.

Crisis
That complex of events which constitutes a crisis is, for any social system, at one and the same

time the most disturbing and the most informative phenomenon known to it. A crisis, in its

original medical sense, is a disturbance which facilitates diagnosis. A basic clinical datum of

physiology and psychology, the crisis should also, as we see it, be an equally basic datum for
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 515

clinical anthropo-sociology—as indeed is already the case as regards the two great

metadisciplinary, phenomenal and anthropo-socio-historical doctrines of our day, those of Marx

and Freud.

We may restate here two heuristic postulates which both Marx and Freud assumed. A

crisis is a significant indicator of latent or subterranean realities (whether systematic or

developmental): this effectively predicates the importance of the submerged, latent, unconscious

element in the social universe. A crisis is a significant indicator of these conflicting realities

which play a life-and-death role within the fabric of every society; this predicates the importance

of the conflicting and dialectical element in the social universe.

But a crisis is not merely an indicator; it also initiates action. It leads to what we may

term `problematisation’ i.e. the questioning, in those sectors affected by the crisis, of what had

hitherto been taken for granted, as something natural and self-evident. This `problematisation’ by

effect and counter-effect (uneasiness or anxiety) triggers off a process of rationalisation, i.e.

vigorous ideological (or mythological) activity aimed at plugging the 'problematical' breach.

Such a process also involves magical, immolatory developments (`guilty persons', etc.) and

eventually, when the crisis is resorbed, a process of psychological repression which rapidly

assumes the form of amnesia.

At a deeper level, a crisis activates two different processes : on the one hand a regression

to the status quo ante, and on the other a modificatory chain-reaction (along the lines worked out

above while discussing the event) which may lead, ultimately, to transformation. From the

interaction of these regressive and transforming processes there emerges a conflictive-associative

dialectic which can translate itself in the form of phenomena leading to stabilisation, regulation,

evolution or revolution.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 516

Their sociologically paroxysmal nature means that crises bring out the elements and

developmental processes of innovation/evolution ; but at the same time they also resurrect an

underlying archaic substratum of myth and magic—brilliantly illuminated by Freud in respect of

the neurotic individual (magic and the world), and now requiring further clarification as regards

its historico-sociological dimension.

Only through crisis can one apprehend both change and the resistance to change.

Social Temporality
In this way we integrate sociology, at the deepest level, with the processes of involution and

evolution. We make a fresh examination of how such processes develop; we are moving towards

the establishment of a second marriage between sociology and history. The first marriage was

that in which—during the first half of this century, under the influence of Marxism and

encouraged by the Ecole des Annales—history moved in the direction of sociology. But during

this same period, sociology was turning its back on history. We must now move back towards

history, not only in order to restore such phenomena as accidents, ruptures, happenings and

crises to where they belong (i.e. within the context of sociological research), but also in order to

understand that the so-called irrational factors (a happening, a crisis) which sociology has

rejected possess their own logical structure. Such a course of action will lead us to assume that

the process of becoming has its own, structural patterns—a concept which simultaneously

generalises and eclipses the tendency commonly known as structuralism.

Let us take the argument one step further. By seeing in history a permanently

pathological condition of disequilibrium, indeed of hysteria, we are not plunging into the

irrational, but rather adopting that clinical perspective which enables us to apprehend, not merely
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 517

the dialectical structures of becoming, but also (by way of various phenomenal manifestations)

the hysterical structures of anthropological man.

Clinical Sociology
All this leads us to posit the need for what we may term `clinical sociology', i.e. a discipline

which bases itself on direct observation of accidental or contingential occurrences, of the

extreme or pathological incident, the crisis above all. All that orthodox sociology rejected as

insignificant—i.e. anything imponderable or statistically negligible, anything that disturbed the

structure or the system—we find, on the contrary, of the greatest significance, whether as

indicator, activating agent, enzyme, ferment, virus, modifier or catalyst.

Clinical sociology acquires a quite extraordinary slant through the contemporaneity of

subject (researcher) and subject-object (of the research). Hitherto no-one has attempted to

penetrate beyond the scientifically disturbing aspect of this relationship. The historian would

justify the scientific validity of his claims by a temporal `distancing' between his own scrutiny

and the object of his studies (historical perspective, 'standing back'). The sociologist tried to

prove his scholarly bona fides by avoiding any concrete contact with his material—i.e. any

dialectic between subject-researcher and the subject-object under investigation.

It looks today as though the more advanced sciences, such as microphysics, are

rediscovering the problem posed by the indissolubility and intercontamination of this subject-

object duality. Until methods of simulation are evolved which make it possible to develop

analogous substitutes for the experimental method, humane sciences will remain in bondage to

this dialectic, which states—very precisely, from the methodological viewpoint—that science is

an art and art is a science, that sociology resembles the clinician for whom art and science fuse in

the act of diagnosis.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 518

One further point. If it is true that the science of man-in-society suffers from an inability

to conduct rigorously controlled experiments, could it not also be a fact that the only approach to

such experimentation is that provided by the one laboratory at our disposal—the world around us

in its living historical context ? Should not our aim today be to refine the comparative method by

henceforth treating isomorphisms with an even greater degree of flexibility than we previously

applied to analogies? Should we not realise (aided by an adequate semiology, and the awareness

that all symptoms in our social life have significance) that such symptoms constitute spontaneous

social checks or test cases, with a wealth of enigmatic meaning awaiting our elucidation? The

road lies open before us, but as yet we have taken no more than the first step down it.

The 'Field of the Present'

As regards the 'field of the present'—i.e. the actual presence of the investigator-researcher at the

phenomenon/ event being studied—we should extract what advantages we can from those well

known scientific inconveniences that arise from over-close proximity to the concrete, and

palliate the inconveniences themselves as far as possible. First of all, that is to say, we must

exploit—in depth and from every available angle—the possibilities opened up by the presence of

the investigator in the actual process.

We can do this by maximum use of on-the-spot observation, not only through the

utilisation of all available recording-devices (tape-recorders, cameras, etc.) but also by increasing

the number of observation-points (emphasis on team-work). Avoid repression, rather exploit the

investigator's personal sensibilities : what I have elsewhere labelled sociological Stendhalism or

Balzacism—Proustism, even. Another way in which the investigator can make full use of his

presence is by actual intervention. This could range from a series of questions going beyond the

ordinary questionnaire, with the object of provoking specific social reactions (not merely of
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 519

opinion but also of behaviour) in any given situation, to what might be termed `maieutic'

interventions. The latter would either dynamically activate the field of enquiry, or else adapt

themselves to a pre-existent dynamic situation. By so doing they could give the investigation a

peri-experimental twist, while at the same time attempting to help the human group caught up in

the situation or process under investigation.

Such practices are, obviously, both uncertain and hazardous. It follows that an

investigation in the 'field of the present' will necessitate self-correction and self-regulation—not

to mention art, initiative and flexibility. These cannot be attained except by breaking away from

the context of pre-programmed, techno-bureaucratic, managerial investigation, and by setting up

working teams of a somewhat unconventional kind.

Furthermore, an inquiry in 'the field of the present' could not be limited to, or contained

by, the normal descriptive monograph. It must take as its terms of reference both a

phenomenological view of the con-temporary world and a general theory: not merely in order to

extract guidance and endorsement from them, but also to question their assumptions. The more

an investigation poses an empirical problem, the more it poses a theoretical problem too. Thus

our experience suggests that studies on the events of May–June 1968 inevitably circle back,

boomerang-like, to that general theory of society, the blind spots in which coincide with the main

focal points of this present crisis.

Conclusion
Thus we take up a position at the dialectical mid-point between event and theory, history and

sociology, the contemporary and the anthropological, and—more specifically in this case—

between phenomenon and discipline, crisis and system, the actual and the potential, trend and

counter-trend, evolution and involution, the innovating and the archaic.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 520

Within the context of the 'Contemporary Sociology' section of CECMAS, our activities

have taken the following form:

Phenomena
L'Esprit du temps (a general study of the mass-culture system), Grasset, Paris, 1961. New edition

scheduled for 1970.

Plodémet: Report from a French Village, Allen Lane the Penguin Press, London, 1971; Fayard,

Paris, 1967. Nouveaux courants de la culture de masse (research in progress).

Konzerns culturels (research in progress).

Néo-archaîsme et néo-modernisme rural (cyclostyled publication), CECMAS, 1968.

Vacances et clubs de vacances (research in progress).

Le Phénomène national (general survey, to be published shortly).

Happenings/Phenomena

Enquêtes flashes (by various members of CECMAS in collaboration), 1960-2.

`Salut les copains' (a study produced by the 'Nuit de la Nation' in June 1963), first published in

Le Monde, 7 July, 1963, and reissued in Arguments politiques, Le Seuil, Paris, 1965, pp.

213-20.

`Une télé-tragédie planétaire : l'assassinat du président Kennedy', in Communications 3, 1964,

pp. 77-81.

`Planète et anti-planète', in Le Monde, 1-2-3 June, 1965.

L'exposition internationale 'Terre des Hammes' de Montréal en 1967 (unpublished research).

La Marée Noire, by Bernard Paillard, 1967 (unpublished).

La Mort de Che Guevara dans la presse française, by Bernard Paillard, 1967 (unpublished).

Crises
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 521

We have attempted to make some progress in our handling of crises on the basis of our

communication, 'Notes méthodologiques sur l'internationalité des révoltes étudiantes' (Milan,

Centro di Studi Lombardi, March 1968), and our articles 'La commune étudiante' and ‘Une

révolution sans visages' in La Brèche, by Morin, Lefort and Coudray (Fayard, 1968). 'Pour une

sociologie de la crise', in Communications 12, 1968, pp. 2-16. Interprétation des interprétations

de mai-juin 1968 (Research seminar, 1968-9, in collaboration with Bernard Paillard and

Raymond Laffargue). 'Culture adolescente et révolte étudiante', Annales, 3, 1969, pp.765-76. `La

Crise' (issue of Communications in preparation).

Research Problems

`Le Droit à la réflexion', in Revue française de sociologie 6 (I), 1965, pp. 4-12.

`De la méthode : une démarche multidimensionnelle', in Plodemet : Report from a French

Village, op. cit., pp. 278¬87.

`Interview dans les Sciences de l'Homme et à la radio-télévision', in Communications 7, 1966,

pp.59-73.

Finally, reference to our anthropo-sociological postulates may be found in Le Vif du sujet, pp.

69-95, 139-82, 183¬85, 332-41 (Le Seuil, Paris, 1969).

Note
The Principles of 'Contemporary Sociology'" from RUMOUR IN ORLEANS by Edgar Morin,

copyright © 1971 by Random House Inc. Used by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprintof

the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights

reserved.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 522

Section III: Social and Political Reflections

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 523

Chapter 23: Hoping Against Hope

Development is a key word which has run through all political ideologies, but it has never been

thought out in depth. At present three revolutions are taking place in the field of knowledge,

particularly in science. They will give rise to a new analysis of development:

 Science used to think that it could state certainties: we now know that room must be

found for uncertainty;

 Science used to think it could deal with problems separately from each other, but

everything that is linked to a context and to a system can no longer be isolated;

 It used to be accepted that a single rationalizing logic sufficed for understanding reality.

Rationality has now opened itself to new logics.

Doubts about Development

These revolutions have thrown doubt on the presupposition that progress has only positive

consequences and leads inevitably to the development of humankind. We now know that

technology is ambivalent and that both people and nature need to be protected from its negative

effects.

We can see that economic issues cannot be separated from social, human and cultural

issues. So long as the link between economic and non-economic factors was concealed,

everything that could not be quantified was neglected. Intellectually satisfying economic models

were constructed, but they were not capable of taking account of reality. We have so far not

taken account of the destructive effects of technical and economic development on our cultural

heritage and on nature. These destructive effects explain why fundamentalism is gaining many

devotees and finding leaders among intellectuals who possess the tools of modern knowledge but

have been disappointed by it.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 524

So it is the end of the euphoric concept of development, which favoured the idea of a

single model applicable to ail situations.

A New Approach
The notion of development must be put back into an ensemble encompassing nature, history,

society and culture. But we still lack an awareness of a common earthly destiny. We must foster

the growth of a kind of human solidarity based on a uterine link between people, for instance the

idea of an earth-motherland. As the poet Machado put it, "Hiker, there is no road; you make the

road by walking". We need to seek a new way, trying to draw inspiration from Heraclitus's

thought, "You cannot hope if you do not seek the unhoped-for".

Note
Reproduced from the UNESCO Courier, March 1995, at

http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0009/000997/099738eo.pdf. Accessed: December 20, 2017.

Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 525
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 526

Chapter 24: Our Common Home

We should abandon the Promethean dream of dominating the universe and aspire instead to live

together on earth.

The preamble to UNESCO's Constitution makes the correct diagnosis that "…since wars

begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be

constructed".

Today, although the illusions and enthusiasms of 1945 are gone, we are again confronted,

in an acute form, with the same fundamental problems that led to the establishment of UNESCO,

the problems of peace and war, the problems of material, technological and economic

underdevelopment facing the countries of the South and the East and the problem of

psychological, moral and intellectual underdevelopment, which is universal.

As we look back over our millennium, the three questions raised by Kant two centuries

ago come again to mind: "What can I know? What must I do? What can I hope for?"

A World in Disarray
The planet is in turmoil: the crisis of progress affects all of mankind, everywhere creating dis-

array, causing old bonds to break and communities to turn in upon themselves; the fires of war

are again being stoked; and the world is losing hold of the global outlook and the sense of the

common good. Faith in science, technology and industry is everywhere running up against the

problems that science, technology and industry are themselves causing. Science is not only a

source of enlightenment, it is itself blind as to where the scientific adventure is leading, an

adventure that is slipping beyond its control and beyond the reach of its conscience. Like the bib-

lical tree of life, science is a tree of knowledge whose fruit contains both good and evil.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 527

The vast apparatus we call science and technology produces not only knowledge and

insight but also ignorance and blindness. Progress in the various branches of science has

produced advantages arising from the division of labour but also the drawbacks of

overspecialization, compartmentalization and the fragmentation of knowledge.

With so many dramatically interrelated problems, the world would seem to be not just in

crisis but on its last legs, in that violent condition where the forces of death grapple with those of

life. Despite all our common interests, we are still one another's enemies, and the unleashing of

racial, religious and ideological antagonisms continues to generate wars, massacres, torture, and

humiliation. Humanity cannot overcome man's inhumanity to man. What we do not know yet is

whether this is merely the death rattle of an old world, heralding a new birth, or whether these

are really the world's death throes.

We had already lost sight of the principles that anchored us in the past; now we have lost

sight of the certainties that guided our steps into the future. There is no law of history that

automatically guarantees progress.

We are simultaneously experiencing the crisis of the past, the crisis of the future, and the

crisis of transition. Contained within these crises are the crisis of development and the crisis of

our era of planet-wide consciousness, comprising such increasingly grave problems as the

urbanization of the world, economic and demographic disorder, lack of progress or reverses in

the development of democracy, and the uncontrolled onward march of science and technology.

Inherent in all this is the danger that civilization will become homogenized and cultural diversity

will be destroyed, a risk inseparable from the equal and opposite danger that the nations will split

up into small, conflicting communities, rendering a shared human civilization impossible.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 528

Our planet is indeed, in keeping with the etymology of the word, a "wandering star". We

are embarked upon a great adventure into the unknown.

Living Together on Earth

The earth itself has lost its old familiar universe: the sun has shrunk to the size of a Lilliputian

star among billions of others in an expanding universe; the earth is lost in the cosmos, its surface

a small, tepid patch of living mould in a glacial expanse where stars and black holes devour one

another with incredible violence. As far as we know at present, this small planet is the only place

where life and consciousness exist. It is the common home of all human beings. We need to

acknowledge our consubstantial link with it, relinquish the Promethean dream of becoming

masters of the universe and aspire instead to living together on earth.

Instead of seeing "the universal" and our various 'homelands" as opposites, we should

link our homelands—family, region, nation—into a concentric pattern and integrate them into

the concrete reality of our earthly homeland. We must stop contrasting a radiant future with a

past of servitude and superstition. All cultures have their own virtues, their own store of

experience and their own wisdom, as well as their shortcomings and areas of ignorance. It is in

its past that a community finds the energy to confront its present and prepare for its future.

Since all humans are children of life and of the earth, "rootless cosmopolitanism", which

is something abstract, must be discarded in favour of "earthling cosmopolitanism", citizenship of

our extraordinary little planet. The reestablishment of ethnic or national roots is justifiable as

long as it goes hand-in-hand with a deeper re-rooting in our human identity as citizens of earth.

The distinguishing feature of mankind is unitas multiplex, unity in diversity, the genetic,

cerebral, intellectual and affective unity of our species, whose numberless potentialities find
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 529

expression through the diversity of cultures. Diversity is the jewel in the crown of human unity

and, conversely, unity is the jewel in the crown of human diversity.

Just as living, ongoing communication needs to be established between past, present and

future, so living, ongoing communication needs to be established between distinctive cul¬tural,

ethnic and national characteristics on the one hand, and, on the other, the concrete reality of one

world, the homeland of all humanity.

Civilizing the Earth

And so we must civilize the earth. This means not only creating a confederation of humanity,

while respecting existing cultures and homelands, but also promoting democracy and solidarity.

Democracy presupposes and also fosters diversity of social interests and groups and

diversity of ideas. In other words it must not only cause the will of the majority to prevail but it

must also acknowledge the right of minorities and protest movements to exist and express

themselves, and allow heretical and deviationist ideas to be expressed. It requires consensus

about respect for democratic institutions and rules, but also needs conflicts of ideas and opinions

to make it lively and fruitful. Conflicts can, however, only fulfil that function if they comply

with the democratic rules of conduct, which keep antagonisms in check by substituting the

combat of ideas for physical combat and which decide the provisional victor among the

contestants by means of debates and elections.

As to solidarity, a society cannot increase in complexity without an accompanying

increase in solidarity, since more complexity means more freedoms, more opportunities for

initiative and more possibilities of disorder, which can be both fruitful and destructive. Carried to

extremes, disorder ceases to be fruitful and becomes mainly destructive; carried to extremes,

complexity deteriorates into disintegration, the breakdown of a whole into its constituent parts.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 530

The cohesion of the whole can, of course, be maintained by reverting to coercion, but to the

detriment of complexity; an integrative solution conducive to complexity can only be achieved

by developing true solidarity, a solidarity that is not imposed upon people but that they feel

within themselves and experience as fraternity. What is valid for any homeland, is now valid for

the whole human community.

This brings us to the problem of reforming our thinking and of rethinking education.

Awareness of all these issues can only be achieved when our thinking is capable of reconnecting

concepts that have become disconnected and areas of knowledge that have been

compartmentalized. The new areas of knowledge whereby we discover the place in the cosmos

of the earth as humanity's homeland are meaningless as long as they remain separated from one

another. The earth is not the sum of the planet, the biosphere and humanity. It is a complex

physical, biological and anthropological totality wherein life springs forth from the history of the

planet and humanity springs forth from the history of life on earth.

Piecemeal ways of thinking that split what is global into fragments naturally ignore the

anthropological complex and the planet-wide context. But waving the global flag is not enough;

the component parts of the global whole must be joined together in a complex, organized system

of linkages, and the global whole itself must be put in context. The reform of thinking that is

required is one which will generate attitudes that take account of the context and of complexity.

A Multidimensional Way of Thinking

As regards the context, we need to think in planet-wide terms when considering politics,

economics, population questions, ecology, the preservation of biological and cultural diversities.

It is not enough, however, to set all objects and events within a planet-wide "framework". What
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 531

is needed is always to seek out the relationship of inseparability, interaction and feedback

between any phenomenon and its context, and between any context and the planet-wide context.

As to complexity, there is a need for a way of thinking that brings together again that

which has been put asunder and compartmentalized, that respects diversity whilst recognizing

individuality, and that tries to discern interdependences. In other words, we need a

multidimensional way of thinking, an organizing approach that takes account of the two-way

relationship between the whole and its constituent parts, an approach that, instead of studying an

object in isolation, examines it in and through its self-organizing relationship with its cultural,

social, economic, political and natural environment, a way of thinking that acknowledges its own

incompleteness and knows how to deal with uncertainty, particularly where action is involved,

since action can only take place where there is uncertainty.

In the course of history we have often seen the possible become impossible, but we have

also seen hopeless dreams come true and improbable events occur.

We now know that the potential of the human brain is still very largely under-exploited.

Since the possibilities of social development are related to the brain's potential, no-one can say

for certain that our societies' capacities for improvement and change are exhausted and that we

have reached the end of history.

The anthropological and sociological possibility of progress re-establishes the principle

of hope for the future, but without "scientific" certainty and without "historical" promises. It is an

unsure possibility, greatly reliant upon raised awareness, willpower, courage and luck; the

raising of awareness is therefore an urgent task.

We are engaged, on a world-wide scale, in life's essential undertaking, that of resisting

death. Civilizing the earth and promoting solidarity, converting the human race to humanity,
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 532

such is the basic, all-embracing aim of any project that aspires not only to progress for mankind

but to its very survival. An awareness of our common mortality should lead us towards solidarity

and reciprocal commiseration one with another, by all and for all.

Note
Reproduced from the UNESCO Courier, November 1995, at

https://en.unesco.org/courier/november-1995 Accessed: December 20, 2017.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 533

Chapter 25: A Shared Crisis

WE must realize, and make sure others realize, that we all share the same destiny. Unity, in this

global age, means that we have a common destiny, of life and of death. The universal is no

longer abstraction, but specific, because what is at stake is the fate of a specific planet and its

specific inhabitants, facing the specific problems of life, death and progress.

The idea of progress, doubtless the key concept of the modern Western world, became

current during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and has since become universal. The idea

of progress seemed to be a veritable law governing the way the world would evolve. It was based

on the scientific determinism that then predominated-a kind of historical law that could be

represented in various ways, that of Auguste Comte as well as that of Karl Marx. It seemed to

have been reinforced by the idea that biological evolution started out with singlecell creatures

and ended up with human beings, and to be supported by developments, which could only be

beneficial, in science and in the faculty of reason. In other words, the idea that spread 'was that of

progress as being necessary and inevitable. World wars and other setbacks seemed to be merely

unfortunate accidents caused by the death throes of reactionary and anti-progressive forces.

Furthermore, the concept of development, which itself became generally accepted after

the Second World War, gave rise to a kind of technological and economic model of progress in

which economic growth emerged as, so to speak, the only driving force needed for every form of

human progress, including opportunities for personal fulfilment. This conception completely

obscured the havoc wreaked by growth and technological and economic development on

cultures, in Europe to begin with, but on a much greater scale in the rest of the world.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 534

Progress, that is to say the future, is today in crisis, a crisis of which there were already

premonitory signs before the war but which is now omnipresent. It affects the entire world, and

especially the developing countries, since it has become clear that both the Western and Eastern

models of development have most often ended in failure.

The crisis started brewing in the totalitarian regimes of the East, whose promise of a

radiant future for mankind has crumbled in recent years, but it has also affected the West, where

no-one, and rightly so, any longer believes in historical or even physical determinism. The

realization has dawned that science can manipulate, enslave and destroy as well as benefit

humanity, and certain half-baked forms of reasoning-thinking that, in the abstract, is logical but

is bereft of any empirical basis-have been spread abroad, masquerading as "reason".

I therefore believe that we are experiencing, in various forms, a shared crisis of progress

whose globalization I also believe to be the reason why people today are turning back to the

ethnic group or to religion. When the future is lost and the present unhappy, miserable and

distressing, the past is all that is left. I feel that our primary duty is to discard the idea of

mechanical progress based exclusively on a technological and economic foundation.

We should realize that underlying the idea of progress was the idea of "a better life",

lived decently and with a civilized respect for others. The idea of progress must henceforward be

governed by this ethical imperative, thus becoming something desirable and possible rather than

an inescapable mechanism.

In my opinion this means that we must abandon the linear perspective according to which

there was an advanced world, a backward world and a primitive world, all of which had to share

the same conception. It must be acknowledged that every civilization or culture is a blend of the

most diverse ingredients superstitions, arbitrary beliefs, profound truths and age-old wisdom-and
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 535

that this includes Europe, which also has its truths, its myths and its illusions, starting with the

illusion of progress.

Rethinking the idea of progress is becoming a priority.

Note
Reproduced from the UNESCO Courier, November 1995, at

https://en.unesco.org/courier/november-1995 Accessed: December 20, 2017

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 536

Chapter 26: The Anti-Totalitarian Revolution1

Even if we can guarantee nothing about the short-term future of the USSR we can be sure

that those who have always been mistaken in their forecasts will continue to be so.

Moreover, what is considered impossible by those feebleminded people who are

incapable of seeing, let alone forecasting, is what is most likely to occur, for whatever the

future of the USSR will be, whether militarist, bourgeois, or socialist, it will invalidate

the myths of both Soviet communism and anti-communism. The future of the USSR will

put the lie to all those who think they can enclose it in their rigid formulas; in short, those

who would like to live with the illusion that there is no future.

(E. Morin, “The Future of Communism,” 1962)

The year 1989 has been characterized by a revolution which began in the USSR and was carried

out in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Romania. It is not yet certain that

this will lead to a firm basis for a democratic system, even though this revolution was inspired by

a desire for democracy. Therefore, although the phrase is accurate, it does not go far enough to

call this a democratic revolution. We can call it anti-totalitarian; however, insofar as it is

overthrowing not just a dictatorship or tyranny, but the whole totalitarian system. So if we want

to understand the revolution which is taking place, it is essential to understand the variety of

totalitarianism known as “communism”.

What is Totalitarianism?
What is totalitarianism? It is a system based on the monopoly of a party which is unique not only

because it is the only party allowed to exist and to have power at its disposal, but also because it

is a most unusual sort of party. It is a party in which all spiritual and temporal powers are
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 537

concentrated in the apparatus which governs, controls and administers. (We may recall the

cybernetic definition of the apparatus as a mechanism which controls a system without

undergoing any reaction.) This apparatus can do anything and knows everything. It is a

disciplinarian, an activist, a soldier, a director and a policeman, all rolled up into one. At the

same time it is the sacred bearer of an absolute truth which has two grounds for its self-

assurance. The first of these is the clear and visible scientific basis which is the knowledge of all

truth concerning the world, especially the laws of history. The other is the deep hidden basis of

religious conviction with its promise of earthly salvation revealed by these “laws of history”.

With Stalin, the apparatus absorbs the party by exterminating the political leaders who

had previously dominated it. He eliminates internal political debate by destroying the left and the

right of the party, thereby making it “monolithic”. Then, after swallowing the party, the

apparatus speaks on behalf of it, the proletariat, the people, the nation, humanity, science and

history.

This apparatus-party is at the same time a party of the masses in the typical Leninist-

Stalinist sense, which is to say that it is spread out into all the divisions and parts of society. The

party of the masses means that all the blue and white collar workers, intellectuals, women, youth,

children, housing, workshops and offices are controlled by the all-pervasive party. The party,

being both of the apparatus and the masses, is doubly totalitarian. It controls all, knows

everything, and is everywhere.

It is a mistake to imagine totalitarianism as the omnipotent power of the state. The state is

completely dominated by the party-apparatus and hence becomes the instrument for the

enslavement of all society. The state is not omnipotent but is subjected to the omnipotence of the

party while at the same time enhancing it. That is why one of the main aspects of the anti-
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 538

totalitarian revolution is the revival of the autonomy of the state and the corresponding withering

away of the party’s domination, right up to the point where it loses the political monopoly which

guaranteed its totalitarian power.

The circular linkage of one control to another in the totalitarian system appears perfect:

the party controls the state, the party’s police controls the party, but the party controls the party’s

police. This all-too-perfect system can go haywire, however, as happened once in 1937-38.

Nothing could stop the series of arrests until Stalin eliminated the major liquidator, Yagoda, and

his successor, Yezhov. This loss of control looked like it was recurring a second time in 1953

until Stalin’s death stopped the lunacy. On the other hand, this ultra-security-minded system has

often gone astray on the occasion of crises of succession when it risks becoming two-headed.

This occurred after Stalin’s death when the head of the secret police, Beria, made a bid for

supreme power and was eliminated by the rest of the party. Then, after Brezhnev’s death, it was

the policeman Andropov who gained control. This all shows that the anti-totalitarian revolution

must abolish not only the omnipotence of the party, but also that of the secret police, which

remains an enormous power in the heart of the state even after the party has withdrawn from the

state.

What is also important with regard to totalitarianism is the need for the complete control

of communication in order to have a monopoly on information and truth. This system is not only

one which enforces censorship to stifle the explosive force of information, as other dictatorial

systems do. It is also a system which presents the image of the blissful, unanimous, enthusiastic

and transparent world of “really existing socialism”. In this world there are no rail or air

disasters, no catastrophes, certainly no strikes, no struggles and no conflict. If any faults or

defects appear they are blamed on enemies, agents of capitalism, saboteurs, traitors or spies. The
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 539

totalitarian control of the media also involves the control of vocabulary, and of the meaning of

words and things. The party alone has the power to give names to things to identify good and

evil. Its truth is presented as a reflection of how things are. This is the significance of “socialist

realism;” things are as they should be. Moreover, official language via the media dictates to the

reader and the viewer what people must say, as well as what must not be said if they wish to

avoid denunciation and arrest. Hence the subjects of the system are forced to participate in an

enormous farce and end up finding it natural to repeat this wooden language like zombies. For a

long time this farce was very effective, as the majority of foreign visitors allowed themselves to

be deceived, being unable to perceive that the unanimous consent of the “Soviet people” was a

generalized lie.

So totalitarianism is a system which wants to become self-contained and to prohibit

questions, and in addition it needs the gulag to eliminate not only different beliefs but also any

possibility of their arising.

The system is obsessed with being self-contained because, as I said in my book On the

Nature of the USSR, this is precisely what it cannot fully be. Totalitarianism cannot be

completely self-contained or else it would destroy itself by destroying its subjects, since “no-one

is perfect” apart from the highest leaders in the party, and then only during their periods of

supposed omnipotence.

There are always gaps and openings, but the system maintains its totalitarian character

precisely by constantly acting to close them. This brings us up to the Gordian knowledge of

totalitarianism, which I defined in 1983 just when totalitarianism seemed all-powerful: it is a

system which derives its enormous strength from its enormous weakness. The weakness is

enormous because the system produces an economy which is both ultra-bureaucratic and ultra-
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 540

anarchic; because it sustains a wide diversity of potentially divergent nationalities under an

artificial constraint; because in the name of the working-class it prevents the working-class from

expressing itself in unions, grievances and strikes; and because it is not able to tolerate political

pluralism or to allow free elections.

Its weakness lies in its use of force to carry out its economic plans and thus to maintain

an inefficient economy. But this force preserves the power of the repressive apparatus of

totalitarianism. The weakness is that this force must tolerate a basic economic anarchy which is a

manifestation of the population’s resistance to the system; yet at the same time this resistance

makes the system work, hence the impossible economy becomes possible. This impossible

economy is the only one which allows the “Soviet” system to work. It becomes even less feasible

when the ratio of force to anarchy is changed, and an attempt is made to introduce the freedom of

the market. Herein lies the tragedy of perestroika, a tragedy which will get worse during 1990:

the impossible economy is losing what made it possible while the new possible economy is still

impossible.

There is an enormous weakness in a system which claims to be the mouth-piece of the

proletariat while not being able to give it the right to express itself, to strike and to form unions.

However, this is also the strength of the system because it has at its disposal the force to forbid

self-expression, strikes and unions. Moreover, thanks to the silencing of the proletariat,

totalitarianism was able, for half a century, to convince a large part of the world, including

capitalists and the majority of intellectuals, that it was really a proletarian government.

It is essential for totalitarianism to always censure; this is both its weakness (it changes

the smallest critical remark into a treasonable crime) and its strength (it prohibits expression of

even the smallest critical remark). It is a system which has its strength in its weakness in another
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 541

sense in that it is not capable of becoming democratic without destroying itself. (Gorbachev’s

miracle is that he undertook a process of democratization and did it so slowly that the apparatus

was not able to immediately perceive the deadly threat to its power and thus to destroy this

process. Yet at the same time he did it so swiftly that the system was not able to suppress the

change.)

Therefore it is a system which has developed a tremendous strength because of its innate

and infinite weakness. From the years 1920-24, the last years of Lenin, all the Bolsheviks

understood that the world revolution would not break out in the immediate future; that Russia

was in a terrible state; that there was no socialist culture; and that life there was unbearable.

From this failure was born the success of the Stalinist myth of socialism in one country, which

contradicted classical Marxism, but which shaped the creation of a pseudo-socialism as well as

of a great industrial power. The attempt to create a socialist culture and society failed and it is

this failure which led to the successful creation of an enormous industrial power.

The second great failure was that of Khrushchev who failed to complete a process of real

liberalization in the USSR, and who repressed this liberalizing process in its satellite countries by

crushing the Hungarian revolution (1956). The failure of his reform brought about the

hegemonist solution, namely the development of the military industrial complex. The system,

incapable of self-reform, looked for salvation in global domination. Starting in 1962 (the Cuban

missile crisis) and continuing until 1985, a politics of global expansion developed, taking

advantage of the opportunities afforded by the Latin-America, African, and Asian situations. We

can say that the dialectical interplay between the enormous weakness and enormous strength of

the system worked in favour of power from 1919 to 1985. Everything that should have brought

down the system turned out to be useful for it. Of course, there was an historic opportunity due to
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 542

the failure of the German offensive against Moscow in 1941, Hitler’s strategic errors, and some

political aberrations germane to Nazism, namely the politics of colonization of Eastern Europe

which could only bring enslavement to the Ukrainians (who had previously welcomed the

Germans as liberators) and hence transformed them into opponents of Hitlerism.

The difference this time lies in the transformation of this dialectic at the very centre of the

enormous strength, the Kremlin, and not at the outskirts.

It was however in the outskirts, the captive nations (where the totalitarian power was the

instrument of a foreign force), that the revolts first broken out, showing the enormous weakness

of the supposedly indigenous communist power in East Germany, Poland, Hungary, and

Czechoslovakia. This first began in 1953 with the uprising in East Germany that was crushed by

“Soviet” tanks. Then, in 1956, the Hungarian revolution was also crushed by “Soviet” tanks, and

in the same year, revolution was prevented in Poland solely because of the intervention that had

taken place in Hungary. In 1968, the Prague Spring was crushed once again by “Soviet” tanks.

All of these revolts were on the way to success, and it is precisely for that reason they were

crushed, as determined by the enormous, concentrated central power in Moscow.

The Breaking of the Vessels

By the end of the 1950s we had come to the conclusion that the system could only be reformed

from the centre. But at the same time reform seemed even less possible because we could only

see the enormous strength emanating from the Kremlin, and we could not take into account that

what was the centre of strength was also the centre of weakness. We must not forget that the

events of Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Romania in 1989 were only made

possible because revolutionary reform had begun in Moscow with perestroika. Of course, it was

not Gorbachev who instigated the collapse of the system in Berlin, who inspired the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 543

emancipation of Prague, or who prompted the explosive events in Romania, but if there had not

been the great beginning of the democratizing process in Moscow in Spring 1989, these

upheavals would never have taken place, or if they had would have been bloodily put down.

Nevertheless in the 1980s Poland and Hungary had ceased to be orthodox “people’s

republics”. In Poland the Solidarity Union had driven a wedge into the system, dug itself in, and

even been able to win a small symbolic victory with the installation of a military man (no longer

the General Secretary of the party) in the most powerful position. However, although Poland was

the country furthest along the path of anti-totalitarianism in June 1989 (when elections took place

which were half-rigged but half-free), the heroic Verdun of Solidarnosc meant that the country

remained temporarily backward while the offensive for liberty broke out everywhere else. On the

eve of 1989 in Hungary, the system was becoming more relaxed and open. This factor was

crucial for the unleashing of the revolutionary wave in the “people’s democracies”. Hungary’s

decision to lift the tiny fragment of the iron curtain which separated it from Austria had an

extraordinary thermodynamic effect. With this unexpected break occurred the even less

foreseeable flood into the neighboring republics of holidaying East German youth. Then, due to a

veritable chain reaction, the tiny break in the Hungarian barbed wire made the collapse of the

Berlin Wall possible within a few weeks, and this led in turn to the downfall of the Prague

Kafkaesque castle. So we can see that 1989, which was an amazing year for Eastern Europe,

benefited from special conditions, from fortuitous coincidences, and from unexpected events.

The gradual course of events could only have begun in the Muscovite capital, and could only

have spread as it did because Hungary, already on the path of liberalization, suddenly opened a

crack which released a torrid flood. This then changed into the huge historic whirlpool of the

anti-totalitarian revolution.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 544

Let us reject the absurd determinism which believes that the fait accompli is inevitable

and that the unleashing of a revolution is controlled from a distance by “historical necessity”.

The anti-totalitarian revolution was not inevitable in 1989 or even in the 20th century.

Totalitarianism, in the decisive year 1934, could have diminished instead of growing had Kirov

and his allies removed Stalin from his throne instead of being destroyed by him. Today people

try to forget the extraordinary characteristic of this event by a posteriori rationalization. An

economistic commonplace tells us that perestroika is an inevitable consequence of the USSR’s

economic failure; up to recently it was these failures that had determined the movement of the

USSR into hegemonism. The economic failure was a failure that was not a failure, since,

although the economy’s mixture of bureaucracy and anarchy worked rather poorly, it did in fact

continue to work, while at the same time the military-industrial complex developed rather well

and continued to do so. Perestroika was not the outcome of a short economic crisis; on the

contrary, it was perestroika which precipitated a crisis in the authoritarian/anarchic economy. Of

course there had been a deep hidden crisis which the intelligentsia, the technical experts and a

part of the party were becoming aware of, namely the crisis of “really existing socialism,” which

was incapable of arranging the future politically, socially, and of course economically, although

it had been promising to do this since 1924. The reformer, Khrushchev, was still able to naively

believe that it was enough to deStalinize in order to achieve a rational economy of abundance

under the wise guidance of the party. Thirty years later, this illusion had disappeared.

A Change of Direction
It was under these conditions that Gorbachev made a choice. An historic change of direction,

imposed by one man and a very restricted group of people, was able to be enforced because it

had key military support for key positions from the beginning. Another General Secretary, his

predecessor for example, would not inevitably have made this choice, the proof being that there
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 545

were in the political system some very powerful enemies of the reform when it showed its true

face. So Gorbachev’s decision is truly momentous and offers an extraordinary historic

opportunity.

Why did it start at the head of the system? We must begin with the initial choice which

was an economic and technocratic one whose consequences Gorbachev could not weigh.

The reformers are people 'who deplore the fact that their civil economy is weak in

relation to the capitalist countries, despite the enormous wealth of the USSR. They want to be

modernizers and renovators, so they want to bring in reforms, sports, oil, machinery and new

opportunities. This becomes all the more desirable since they have lost faith in the economic

efficiency of the ultra-centralized/planned/bureaucratized system called socialism. These

reformers have had time to become informed and reflect during the “stagnation years” of

Brezhnevism. They want to or are able to acquire information and they see the economic success

of the “capitalist” market economy. They have lost their faith in the future of their bureaucratic

economic system and the only faith in the future that they can now maintain depends on the

success of their reforms. They are also reformers because they have lost faith in the supposed

superiority of so-called socialism over so-called capitalism in the areas of humanity, society, and

culture; they have lost faith in themselves as bearers of the salvation of humanity; and they have

lost faith in the idea that they have a monopoly on the meaning of history. This loss of faith is

inseparable from the withering away of Marxism, accompanied by internal secret rot in these

reformers which sets free something that has nurtured Marxism from its origins, that is,

European humanism. Marxism was nurtured on great ideas which were expressed in the

philosophy of the enlightenment, in the French Revolution, and in German philosophy. The idea

inherent to Marxism that we must work for the improvement of the fate of humanity had been
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 546

turned away from this goal by the apparatus in order to justify all its acts. This notion appears

revitalized in the universalist idea of belonging to a common human civilization without any

appropriation of the destiny of humanity by the party. As a supporter of perestroika told me in

Moscow in 1988, “We are all in the Titanic rushing in the night towards the same iceberg”. This

all surfaces in Gorbachev’s “new way of thinking.”

When did it begin? How did the intellectual evolution of this person develop to the point

of becoming a “new way of thinking”? Let us note that the Number One apparatchik, Gorbachev,

is not alone; he has a wife, Raisa, who is cultivated and has no doubt been open for a long time

to the ideas expressed by writers banned during the Brezhnev era. There are also young people in

the families of these apparatchiks who, by enjoying such privileges as being able to make tiny

acts of non-conformism with impunity, can express their criticism and desires. Thus, there is

through women and the young an umbilical cord to the Russian intelligentsia, whose samizdats

had been expressing the need for freedom. As a result, a tiny intellectual milieu was formed

around a modernist elite of apparatchiks and constituted a favourable cultural environment in

which the “new way of thinking” could develop. It was necessary; however, to wait for three

years to see if perestroika would survive. In addition, before the will to reform could radicalize

and turn into a political movement, the failure of the first of the economic reforms and the

discovery of the moronic resistance of the apparatus both had to occur.

So the “deviation” started from above, which is to say that instead of being repressed it

was promoted by those in power. (This also explains why it has been continually held back by

and within the apparatus, which has to undergo a reform coming from its centre while resisting

it.) For this reason it has succeeded in its first steps, even if it may fail in the long term. In any
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 547

case Gorbachev is a Moses even if he cannot see the promised land, even if there is no promised

land.

The Revolution
In order to understand the nature and scope of this revolution, we must relate it to two factors:

firstly, to the totalitarian system set up by the concentrated, centralized power of the party and

secondly, to the imperial political axis, which tends towards world hegemony in an attempt to

escape the internal deficiency of the economic system. The only way to achieve this without

actually altering the system was by profiting from developed economies which had been

subjugated.

The reforms begin slowly in 1986, taking the form of perestroika/glasnost in 1986 to

1988, and become a truly transforming process in 1989-90. In 1989 the revolution begins in the

USSR and paradoxically this allows it to commence, develop and spread at an incredible pace

over a short period of time, in Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. A

weakening at the centre of power in Moscow was all that was needed for everything to collapse

on the boundaries.

The revolution that begins in the USSR simultaneously affects the basis of both internal

and external politics. As we have pointed out, the two sides are interconnected. The renunciation

of hegemony is a key aspect of the revolution. Political strategy becomes directed toward

internal reform and away from the domination of the outside world. In 1987, a treaty is signed

agreeing to the dismantling of short and medium range missiles. In 1988, a decision is made to

cease the war in Afghanistan, and several moderating initiatives are taken on the occasions of

international conflicts. Finally, in 1989, a policy of non-intervention prevails as revolutions

occur in the people’s democracies. It is now clear that the Gorbachev movement leads to the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 548

renunciation not only of expansionism but also of the domination of the Eastern bloc. From 1989

onwards, the change in the political course is demonstrable.

The internal revolution begins with the two inseparable joint reforms of glasnost and

perestroika. Glasnost, starting off slowly, gradually grows until, in the summer of 1990, it

introduces rights to freedom of expression and of the press. A person, who is looking at glasnost

from a strictly empirical point of view and who is unaware that systematic deception is essential

for totalitarianism, would think only that just one more censorship had disappeared. But to look

at glasnost from the point of view of the totalitarian system reveals that it has the effect of a

torpedo which hits the engine room beneath the waterline. Glasnost is not in itself decisive, but it

is necessary if a decisive transformation is to take place, since one of the props of the system is

the gulagization of information, words and ideas. Glasnost is the simultaneous degulagization of

information, images, words and ideas. This results in both a corresponding degulagization of

culture and the re-entry of the intelligentsia into the public arena.

At this point, let us remember that from the 19th century onwards the intelligentsia

played a major ethical and political role in Russia, especially as political parties had been

suppressed in Tsarist Russia, and were later crushed by Lenin and destroyed by Stalin. From

Khrushchev’s time onwards, especially during the Breshnev era, the intelligentsia fought solidly

for respect for facts and for historical truth. The Russian intelligentsia has two great symbolic

figures: one, Solzhenitsyn, focuses on Slavophilism, religion and literature; the other, Sacharov,

focuses on the West, humanism, and science. These men, each opposite to yet complementing

the other, both present an unequivocal message of opposition to deception. The entrance of the

intelligentsia to the arena, in and through glasnost, plays an enormous role and creates the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 549

climate necessary for the awakening life. This is done under the impulse of the media, in which

the intelligentsia has recently been active.

The first instance of this awakening occurs in May 1986 at the congress of film-

producers, which elects Klimov as its president. Soon afterwards, works previously thrown into

the sewers of the system (which detests honour and integrity) re-emerge. At last the great honest

novels appear: The Children Arbat in 1987, Doctor Zhivago in 1988. Thus, glasnost created the

conditions for intellectual ferment, which in turn made democratic ferment possible. Here we

have the beginning of a key process which will undermine the very foundation of the system: the

omnipotence of the apparatus.

Although the anti-totalitarian revolution unfolds in the satellite nations in 1989, at that

point only one decisive part of this process had been carried out.

Only in 1990, although still incomplete, does it become irreversible. From the end of

1989, the abolition de jure of the legitimacy of the absolute power of the apparatus completes the

anti-totalitarian revolution in the people’s democracies. This further stimulates and accelerates

the process leading to the repeal of the Article which promulgates and assures the divine right of

party, Article 6.

The repeal of this Article is not only symbolic, it is also a matter of principle: the

principle of public rights and the mythological legitimization of the totalitarianism system; and

the principle of popular sovereignty itself. This is why the anti-totalitarian revolution, in all the

popular democracies, has laid down quite clearly the abolition of the offensive article by which

the apparatus had proclaimed itself absolute sovereign as one of its main objectives and first

achievements. According to a circular logic, everything that affects the state truth of Marxism-

Leninism affects it as if the veracity of the State and the legitimacy of the party depended on it.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 550

So what stands or falls with Article 6 is not only a political monopoly, it is also a sacred power,

that of the Magi, bearers of truth, incarnated in the beastly heads of the apparatchiks. In Moscow,

Article 6 was not removed until February 1990. This achievement not only results in the

establishment of a democracy, but is also the single most decisive step in the abolition of

totalitarian power.

So the historical whirlwind had left Moscow only to return with a vengeance in 1990.

Beginning in the summer of 1989, this whirlwind sets in motion the events in Poland, Hungary,

East Germany and Romania. Thanks to Moscow, these countries carried out the anti-totalitarian

revolution before Moscow itself did. Everywhere, the monopoly of the party is annulled and the

party as an apparatus, based on both democratic centralism and the myth of the possession of

truth etc., self-destructs and tries to reconstruct itself in another shape while painfully seeking a

social democratic face. In some cases the party splits up, in others it evaporates as happened in

Romania (where the party which comprised three quarters of the population disappeared into a

black hole in the space of a day). The multi-party system has been established everywhere, and

accompanied by a corresponding upsurge of all types of parties. Unions have appeared, the

state’s autonomy has been restored, and the military wing of the party, directly dependent on the

apparatus, has been rationalized and demilitarized. In all these totalitarian systems the party had

this military body which was often better equipped than the army (even in the USSR, the KGB

had an army, airforce, factories, etc.), as well as its own SS and red Gestapo such as the Stasi and

Securitate, which were units dedicated to internal repression. Now the militia is either being

removed from the party secretariat and handed over to the government (as in Hungary), or purely

and simply destroyed. In the USSR, however, some important bastions of the dismantled

totalitarian system still resist. The huge party is not yet reduced to the condition of an ordinary
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 551

party, as it retains its goods, its properties, and its internal and external networks, especially

those of the KGB and the army.

The party, which was in fact conservative, becomes reactionary by making an alliance

with all that is anti-democratic and aggressively nationalist in Russia, through which it seeks to

restore itself. The KGB continues to direct things from the shadows without being subject to

control by the elected authorities. A process of osmosis occurs between the conservatives of the

army, which is no longer monolithic, and the conservatives of the apparatus. The anti-totalitarian

revolution, so quick to erupt in the captive nations, finds it extremely difficult making headway

in an empire which after sixty-nine years bears the deep scars of the most extraordinary

totalitarianism that history has ever produced.

The Disintegration of Totalitarianism

So what held together at the centre of the totalitarian system now fragments, disperses and

disintegrates. The police-militia loses its temporal power which slips away from it along with its

spiritual power over sociological and historical truth. It starts to lose its grip on the state, and its

power over the masses.

The anti-totalitarian revolution, by making the party surrender cultural and economic

power, forces it to release its hold on the state which then recovers its relative autonomy. The

revolution compels the party to become a normal political one. In the cultural and economic

spheres, the party loses its quasi-religious function; it loses its function as a policeman, and its

military function, both of which are transferred to the state. In other words, the enormous

strength which lay in the heavy concentration of all the party’s powers no longer exists. A

heavily centralized system collapses along with its centre, as happened to the divine power of the

Incas whose empire collapsed once it and its court became captive. In Czechoslovakia, a bunch
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 552

of arrogant apparatchiks, though armed to the teeth, was not able to withstand the crowd at close

quarters. We witnessed on TV the extraordinary phenomenon of Ceausescu’s amazement during

a mass demonstration which should have gone smoothly, since the dictator had organized it

himself, and how instead he fled after jeering broke out.

The beginning of a class struggle accompanies the destruction of the monopolist

multifunction power of the party. It is noteworthy that it is in the so-called socialist countries that

this struggle regains youthful vitality. This is because there was a gulf, a decisive gap almost

without intermediaries, between “them” (the apparatchiks, the privileged nomenclature) and “us”

(all who are deprived of rights and privileges, special shops, comfortable homes, private

quarters, official dachas, and official vehicles). This class consciousness becomes epidemic with

the disclosure of the widespread corruption of the ruling class (it is only Western intellectuals

who imagine the apparatchiks to be impartial, incorruptible puritans, inspired by a burning faith,

when in reality an extraordinary moral disintegration accompanies the internal disintegration of

their faith). So the thaw awakens the class struggle. Nevertheless, the class struggle is diminished

and even inhibited by the fact that the revolution in the USSR belongs to the top of the apparatus

rather than to the popular base. Also, in the people’s democracies, this revolution takes place in a

peaceful manner by way of an historic compromise, consciously accepted by both sides to avoid

bloodshed. Indeed the revolution takes place by virtue of a gradual passage of change instead of

by a decisive confrontation. The change presumes an historic compromise with the rulers and

profiteers from the old regime, who are forced to give up their power in exchange for the

renunciation of any retribution, revenge or purge. It was such an historic compromise that Juan

Carlos negotiated in Spain between Francoists and democrats, when the Francoists let events

take their course in exchange for not being purged or judged.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 553

In the USSR, and in the people’s democracies, the underlying historic com-promise is

due to the absence of both bloody purges and judicial proceedings, not only against party

officials and bureaucrats, but also against those responsible for massacres, deportations, obscene

trials, and assassinations. This revolution is amazingly restrained in comparison to others. Such

restraint brings to mind the similar behaviour of Spain, when the Francoists were forced out and

replaced by new democratic functionaries. Up to the present (we cannot predict the future) the

anti-totalitarian revolution has been taking place peacefully by virtue of the implicit historic

compromise between those who formerly had an absolute monopoly on power and the new

authorities which include deserters and converts from the previous regime. The advantage of the

above compromise obviously lies in the non-violent nature of this revolution.

The non-violent course of the anti-totalitarian revolution undoubtedly relates to the fact

that its initial impulse was given by Gorbachev, a figure of compromise and transition who has

led political reform from 1987 to 1989 in a way which was slow enough to avoid unleashing a

confrontation, but rapid enough to actually cause change. For this reason, the party did not feel

the need to act with the power of despair, or to kill to survive. Instead it was offered a face-

saving way out, and even given sinecures. Even so, nothing was pre-ordained. Honecker could

have fired on the crowd like President Deng did in Tiananmen Square in China and had he done

so, the Stalinists in Prague would have followed his example which would have encouraged the

Stalinists in Moscow. All these people had been capable in the past and remained capable in

1989 of repeatedly killing to protect their authority. Destiny, which after some hesitation, leaned

towards the side of repression in Peking, tilted towards the side of liberalization in Moscow.

Why did the despots of Germany and Czechoslovakia not kill when they still held all the power?

Because they knew that this time the Russians would not intervene to suppress the movement.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 554

Once it is no longer sustained by the massive power of the USSR, their strength diminishes as its

enormous weakness becomes apparent so omnipotent totalitarianism rapidly loses all its

substance and effectiveness.

The non-violent nature of the revolution was indispensable for the introduction of

democracy. A democracy requires the existence and activity of conflicts, but it is even more

important that they do not become extreme and take a violent form, since unleashing violence

during a revolutionary period could result in either the victory of a counter-revolution, or a civil

war whose outcome if unforeseeable would in any case be non-democratic. All this is still in

progress and will continue to pose numerous problems, as the absence of a purge means that

many elements of the ancient regime remain embedded in the state structures.

Future generations will have to marvel at the extraordinary sequence of events from 1987

to Spring 1990. In the early period, up to the emergence of two key themes, glasnost and

perestroika, starting was a slow process. Then Gorbachev’s pilotage, while at times gaining

momentum and at other times slowing, was never neutralized or even checked, and was never

destabilizing though it sometimes reached the limit. It was done against the party from within the

party, and was facilitated by the Stalinist habit of always agreeing with the General Secretary. He

brought about democratic renewal by using the old authoritarian methods. The torrent of events,

because of its social and national outbreaks, was always headed towards a dismemberment of the

extraordinary totalitarian system. From the summer of 1990, though not dispossessed, Gorbachev

is forced to work alongside Yeltsin in domestic affairs. This alliance, fragile as it is, links the

reforming current to the other revolution underway, that is, the economic revolution. In any case,

the eventual success of Gorbachev's perestroika can only serve to make him lose his authority as

chief pilot, and transform him into a federation president.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 555

The anti-totalitarian revolution of itself results in two other revolutions in the USSR

whose direction and outcome are still unknown:

1. an economic revolution, which should transform an ultra-regulated state economy into an

economy which is not entirely market-dominated, but in which the market can bring its

stimuli and regulations into play. Such a revolution, though logically necessary, is

logically unimaginable. For if the transformation were to be carried out violently, the

whole society would be destabilized; yet if it were to be carried out gradually it would not

work, as the system would suppress any piecemeal reforms one by one. It has been left to

life and art, both of which demand ingenuity and improvization, to deal concretely with

this problem which neither Western economists (who understand market economies, but

not transitions from totalitarian systems to market economies), nor Eastern ones (who

have the opposite problem) can resolve. Perhaps there will be a period of confusion when

there will be the possibility of turning away from or even overturning the democratic

process;

2. a revolution at the federal level which could transform the empire called the Soviet Union

into a confederation of nationalities.

These three revolutions are all interdependent. If the first, the political one, commences before

the others (all the more so because the economic reform set in motion in 1986 has been

ineffective at the heart of the old political system), it risks experiencing disastrous repercussions

during the period of transition when the old system is collapsing before a new one has been born.

If that were to happen, the anti-totalitarian revolution, instead of leading on to a stable

democracy, could spill into a nationalist/militarist dictatorship where the born- again

conservatives could take their revenge. Similarly, the revolution at the federal level could run
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 556

aground under the strain of both centrifugal nationalist pressures and economic crises. The three

revolutions co-determine and affect each other so they may end up either stimulating or

destroying each other.

The End of the Soviet System

The anti-totalitarian revolution does not of itself resolve the problem of nationalities in either the

USSR or the former people’s democracies, all of which have their own national minorities. It

could even be said that the revolution sets free nationalist sentiments and lends to reawaken

memories of ethnic, religious, and national conflicts which had been put on ice.

In the USSR, the problem is to overturn a de facto empire and transform it into a

confederation or a genuine federation. It is a matter of resolving extremely acute national

problems, because as these nationalities have been subjugated by conquest they have developed

nationalist sentiments whose strength has been augmented by Russian domination which was

regarded as a foreign occupation. These nationalist sentiments have different manifestations in

the Baltic States (which became part of the USSR by an agreement between Stalin and Hitler)

and Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. These problems are highly complicated and will require

great acumen from both the Kremlin and the national leaders of these countries if they are to

unite successfully in a confederation. An event of great significance occurred at the beginning of

the Summer of 1990 when the Russian National Assembly proclaimed the sovereignty of Russia

in relation to the Soviet Union. This proclamation had been both preceded and followed by

similar ones in practically all of the republics. But it was fundamental to the outcome of these

proclamations that the Russian nation itself be dissociated not only from the fiction of a soviet

confederation but also from a strictly imperial system. We can scarcely imagine England or

France proclaiming their sovereignty in relation to their own empires at the end of the Second
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 557

World War. This proclamation of Russian sovereignty is not only an expression of a movement

of national regeneration which takes advantage of the anti-totalitarian revolution to free itself. It

also establishes a strong link between the reforming party and Russian national sentiment which

dissociates itself from the Great-Russian hegemonism inherited from Tsarism and taken over by

the Soviet system. Of course, chauvinistic and Great-Russian nationalists who are currently still

in a minority would have an historic opportunity if the reformers experience an economic failure.

Such a course of events would tragically plunge the Great-Russian people back into the

centuries-old historical disaster which the “innocent one” sings about at the end of Boris

Godunov:

Flow, flow, flow bitter tears

Weep, weep, Christian soul

Soon the enemy will come and darkness will fall

A darkness black and impenetrable

Woe, woe to Russia

Weep, weep Russian People, hungry people.

It is quite possible that this decolonization will lead to the partial if not total break-up of the

empire with a secession of the Islamic nationalities of the South East; and/or the joining together

of secessionist Baltic countries into a group of adjoining Nordic coastal states. History is

hesitating; it has not yet made a final decisive change of direction. We do not know if the

process, which has so far only experienced localized short-term crises, will remain peaceful or

ignite the flames of war. Similarly, we do not know whether the combination of the

desovietization of the USSR with the new national problems in the former people’s democracies
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 558

and with the German re-unification will provide a widespread Balkanization including both East

and West Europe or a general affirmation of federative treaties.

We are not saying that democracy can in the long run simply establish itself on the ruins

of totalitarianism. But in any case the oppressive burden of totalitarianism which looked as

though it would continue past the year 2000 appears to have been lifted. This does not exclude

the possible appearance of a new totalitarian formula in the next century. Nor does it mean that

we will be relieved of similar offensive phenomena once and for all. Such things have existed

from time immemorial and will continue to plague our present age in various fanatical religious,

racist and nationalist forms. However, unless we witness the birth and world expansion of a new

third form of totalitarianism in a future age, these phenomena will have local and temporary

manifestations, but not a universal form endowed with the power of unlimited self-reproduction.

The DNA code of the system has been ruptured and the totalitarian system which deceitfully

called itself socialism is genetically dead. This is the legacy of our fading 20th century. It has

shattered the myth of the glorious future, and the comforting message for the next generation is

that this myth is dead.

But in this difficult age of ours which has been deprived of this myth, forces of the past

have been unleashed, and people are living in the present, without a future. When will we be able

to imagine a type of future both fragile and uncertain yet able to give us hope?

Note
The first version of this text was published in the journal Liberation in February 1990; then

revised and expanded version was included in the book Un nouveau commencement by E. Morin,

G. Bocchi and M. Ceruti, Editions de Seuil, March 1991. Finally, it was reprinted in English

under the title “The anti-totalitarian revolution” in Thesis Eleven, Vol. 30 (1), 1991, pp. 1-16.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 559

It is reprinted here with the permission of the publishers. Although Morin’s reflections are

concerned with an early phase of the Eastern European revolution, their relevance to more recent

events should not be overlooked. They are, for one, a useful reminder that the anti-totalitarian

revolution should not be identified with the transition to democracy; the former has made the

latter possible, but by no means certain.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 560

Chapter 27: Realism and Utopia1

Translation by Cohn Anderson with revisions by Amy Heath-Carpentier

The Unknowable Real

The problem with reality is that we think we understand it well, but we really don’t understand it

at all. The past, our past, seems absolutely clear to us, but it is not. When considering the 20th

century, which is our past, we come to recognize that Communism and also Nazism—the

major “movements” of that century—have not had rigorous analysis. Soviet Marxism, ie

“Communism”, was a literal utopia: not realizable in reality, an ideal. The word 'communism'

served to mask a reality that was radically different from its ideology. A reality so difficult to

analyse, understand and know that Francois Furet, an author and communist during the

hard-line period, wrote about revolutionary feelings in Le passé d'une illusion [The Passing

of an Illusion] 2 without revealing the fundamentally religious properties of this communism,

which sought salvation on earth and was a great source of hope. As with all great religions,

communism created its own martyrs, its heroes, its executioners and its persecutors. It was not

just another religion, though, but a veritable phenomenon that ravaged and transformed this

century.

Reality is certainly important. Contemplating the Soviet Union and the idea of utopia,

it must be said that this nonexistent, barrack-like, socialist utopia was founded on a doctrine

that regarded itself as reflecting reality. What is alarming is when a utopia asserts itself as real,

historically determined, and the irrefutable, scientific outcome of the laws of History. In

contrast, what appears mild and harmless is a utopia that understands it is completely

unrealistic.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 561

So what can we do to avoid being deceived by such pseudo-realistic utopians and not

be simply told “Well, yes, if something cannot be made real, it is utopian. . .,” without

sinking into myopic realism? The very present itself has an enigmatic and uncertain face.

This is detectable even in the West. Everything that seems solid and functional can be

lost. The present remains unknowable. We are living in a sort of cyclonic low-pressure

zone. We feel that the storm is about to burst at any moment, but then it doesn't, it seems

to move on. And then, wait, it hasn't really moved on at all. We don't really know what is

going to happen. The present is uncertain. Regarding the post-communist period, it is

interesting to see just how surprising it is. The Russian historian Yuri Afanasev's3

analysis brings to light that, once that gigantic apparatus that was the Soviet state became

fragmented, each of the pieces changed into a small capitalist entity. The extraordinary

thing is that those same apparatchiks, who were at the centre of a system that controlled

everything, were those who metamorphosed into dynamic entrepreneurs of the market

economy or into intransigent nationalists of emergent, neo-nationalist movements. And

what can be made of the new tide of democracy? What is going to happen in Russia? Afanasev

shows us that we must come to terms with the riddle of the past to inquire into the future.

What path will Russia take toward what we no longer dare call modernity—for that concept

is now leaking like a sieve—but rather towards this amalgam of modernity and post-

modernity?

The End of the Future and the Return of Mythified Pasts

The present reality is marked by the invisible impact—invisible because it has taken

some time to happen—of a massive meteorite. As was the case with the huge asteroid

that collided with the earth at the end of the Secondary Era, the one blamed for the

extinction of the dinosaurs, this latest collision has left the whole earth covered in a
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 562

gigantic dust-cloud for a long period. However, it won't be dinosaurs that this new

meteorite destroys, but our future: the nickel-plated guarantee of steady progress and

uninterrupted betterment that was our guide and hope. The very notion of progress, in all

its determinist, mechanical, fated, inevitable, marvellous and radiant glory, has been

annihilated.

Given such circumstances, it is quite understandable that there has been a tumultuous

return of the past or of pasts plural. Granted, this phenomenon is less turbulent where

there is a modicum of liveability, despite the uncertainities, and more violent where

misfortune has taken a toll and where, rightly and sometimes wrongly, identities feel

threatened. In such cases, the past returns under a myriad of shapes, merging to create a

monstrous form derived of myth and fervid fantasy—a regressive utopia in the words of

Sami Nair—a past in which religion, race, nation are mixed...

The nation-state is an expression of the desire to 'modernize,' since the invention of

the nation-state was one way that modernization spread across the planet. It facilitated the

effective emancipation of populations, especially within the boundaries of an oppressive

colonial empire. However, the nation-state, in the modern and protective sense, carries

within it the notion of a maternal and paternal substance that enfolds us—the 'motherland'

or the 'fatherland'. This image implies a deep unity, a miracle amalgamation of what is

most archaic. Therefore, we are witnessing the universal call to nationhood and calls for

the creation of mono-ethnic states, resulting in the temporary necessity of using the term

'ethnic group' as a descriptor.

The phenomenon of the mono-ethnic state proves highly peculiar if we recall that

France, Spain and England were all formed as a result of the sluggish, historic process of
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 563

highly diverse ethnic groups coming together and integrating. It is as if, suddenly, forty

ethnic groups in France demanded that they be recognized as constituting France—a

situation that would be fraught with incalculable consequences. Historical time makes the

matter unrealistic.

In this process, we must emphasize the importance of two aspects hitherto less

visible, the twin afflictions that can grow within and be cultivated by the nation-state:

purification and the sacralization of the borders. The idea of purification is unfortunately

embedded within the formation of the Spanish nation, which was built on the rejection

of the Muslims and the Jews. Similar processes occurred in England with the expulsion of

the Catholics and in France with the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

In other words, these two ideas—purification and sacralization—are precisely

what we as Europeans sought to overcome. It is not so much the ethnic homelands that we

want to transcend, nor even the national entities, let alone the individual States whose

power nevertheless should be limited; what needs to be surpassed is the drive for purity and

the sacralization of the space. Therefore, the Schengen Accords and the European passport

were symbolically significant and the common currency, beyond whatever economic

sense it makes, also may have a symbolic justification. However, we are not talking

about a process of homogenization either.

Real-politik and ideal-politik

To paraphrase Rimbaud: I have made the magic study

Of happiness . . .

one might say: I have made the interminable study

Of the real.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 564

To diagnose today’s reality, other sources of illumination are necessary, but the subject is

inexhaustible. The first thing is to reject trivial realism, which insists that we adapt to the

immediate, to the established order, to the fait accompli and to admit the victory of the

victorious.

Beyond such trivial realism, what remains? We need to recognize that the real is

swarming with possibilities and that we have no way of knowing what may emerge from

it, nor how to choose one's own path or commitments. The imaginary, mythological and,

of course, emotional cohabit in human reality, and the compartmentalization of the social

sciences and humanities cannot not sufficiently account for this fact. As for economics, it is

much too refined a science. Why? Its object is expressed in numbers and quantities, and in

such perfection, flesh, blood, passion, suffering, happiness and cultural expression are

abstracted away. Therein lies the problem of today's reality, politics, the art of the polis, has

been made entirely subservient to economics, the art of the cekos or household.

To rediscover 'true reality', our responsibility must be restored. It may be a

commonplace to say so, but it must be constantly repeated: any knowledge—whether of an

object or a crowd-filled lecture hall—is a translation and a reconstruction. Of course, one

can be deceived by hallucinations, one can be in error, but there is no knowledge that is a

photographic reflection of reality. Admittedly, knowledge in the form of ideas and theories

is a translation/reconstruction of the real in a refined form, but this also can carry with it

enormous illusion and error. Such illusions are the stuff of the whole of human history.

Marx and Engels said that the history of humanity was comprised of errors and illusions

that humans made about themselves and their achievements. In so saying, they also committed

the same types of errors and suffered the same illusions. So is it not worthwhile saying to
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 565

oneself: 'Can't we at least try to react?' Quite clearly, all knowledge is interpretation. The

illusion lies in saying: 'I call real what I believe is real'; that is to say: 'I call realism what I

derive from my personal conception of the reality.' Reality, even the most objective, always

has a cognitive and subjective element to it. To truly know reality, the subject must be

capable of critical thinking and questioning truths that appear self-evident within their

doctrinal systems. It might be added that the discrediting of all individually autonomous

moralities and all autonomous assertions of responsibility is the common feature of all

belligerent nationalisms and all totalitarian systems from Stalinism to Nazism.

Subjectivity is not an enemy of the objective consideration of realities. It simply

requires the subject who is engaged in the world to remain critical. The Polish activist Adam

Michnik4 references what amounted to an ethical revolt within the Stalinist system. This

type of revolt is one that I have known and experienced myself, in my own fashion, with

my Polish friends of 1956. What happened at that time? Those who had a clear vision of the

system were not those who used economic analysis to conclude that what Marx said about the

process of decomposition of capitalism was incorrect, perhaps, and thus capitalism was not on

the brink of decomposing. Nor were they those who were subjecting Marxism to rational,

theoretical examination. Those who had a clear vision were those who were saying: 'We can't

endure any more lies and so much humiliation!' Often the ethical revolt ushers in a more lucid

awareness than the acceptance of the fait accompli, because, through revolt, one can see things

that others can't.

The lucidity that this kind of ethical revolt provides is critical for understanding reality

itself. That is the substance of the messages of the Soviet dissidents Solzhenitsyn, Grossman

and others. They saw and understood. Often, you must be part of a deviant minority to
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 566

know reality. Although there is no perspective, no possibility, no salvation, though we

are bound up in a system that is apparently eternal, we are nevertheless always confronted

with the problem of this reality, which has its mystery and its uncertainty and which we

must never accept as it is. Of course, if we were just to say 'No, we can't tolerate that', it

would not be very useful either.

So what is it that is intolerable? The intolerable is what is constantly intolerably tolerated.5

What does that mean? It means that it is not enough to repeat that it is intolerable. We know it

already. The important thing is not to accept the fait accompli. It is not enough just to

anathematize something; we must also not forget and continue in the same direction. In

politics, one is not always a victor; one is defeated more frequently.

Thus, there is an essential conflict between the politics of the Ideal-Politik and Real-

Politik; politics that seek to realize ideals and real politics. There is a contradiction.

Granted, there are cases where one must be subordinate to the other. Most often, it

means subordinating the politics of the ideal to those of the real. However, we must

understand where to stop.

It’s a dialogic; two contrary points of view that at any given moment must be held

together, giving priority now to one and then to the other. In this context, we recall the

famous principle of reality that we contrast with the principle of desire, which was Freud’s

great conquest. We know that desire is part of reality. However, reality is no longer as

consistent and certain as one could consider it to be in Freud’s lifetime, which is why I

think uncertainty must be placed at the heart of reality if we are to develop a sound

understanding of reality.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 567

However, integrating uncertainity does not mean that we do not know anything, nor

does it mean that everything is uncertain. We are called to navigate an ocean of uncertainty

in which there are isolated islands and archipelagos of certainty. There are numerous local,

partial and fragmentary certainties that aid us in our navigation, but, having said that, we

must never forget the ambient uncertainty that surrounds us.

We are faced with the problem of a reality that is complex, multiple, uncertain

and still unfolding. Yet, it is not just a subterranean process, to pick up Hegel's image of

the 'old mole'. The real advances with a crablike motion, that is, by a series of oblique

movements that are absolutely abnormal and bizarre. These deviations are trends that will

transform reality.

The real is where the possible is effectively impossible. We possess the material

and technical capacities to solve a great many of the problems facing humanity, but it is

impossible according to existing laws, economic norms and international relations. The

world is a world where the possible is impossible and where it is possible to live the

impossible. At a given moment, when there is a breaking point of contradictions and

conflicts, when the system cannot solve its own problems, it either collapses or a new

system appears, a metasystem, which possesses the principles and rules to grapple with

these problems. It’s a step forward. And who will forbid the metasystem? We will be

told that it is not possible, but how to know?

Towards Complexity of Thought

What do we call complex? We call complex something that is confused, incomprehensible,

uncertain; so uncertain that we cannot define it. There are some who naively think that

complex thought is spreading and growing stronger because more people say: 'Ah, you

know, that's very complex…'. However, when they say 'That's very complex', they really
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 568

mean: 'I can't give you an answer.' By contrast, complex thought tries to respond to the

challenge of complexity rather than observing the difficulty of responding. It registers two

things to which a response must be made.

The first is uncertainty, which strives or copulates with the real. How does one

strive and copulate at the same time? That too is complex, as Delacroix showed in the

very beautiful painting that hangs in the Church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris, Jacob Wrestling

with the Angel. Looking at the painting, you say to yourself: 'They look like they are

copulating!' No, they are wrestling. Still, it is rather odd, a wrestling match that looks for all

the world like copulation... Yet, it is exactly what wrestling with uncertainty is like; that is

how it happens to confront uncertainty.

As the idea of a determinist order of the world and of History has completely

collapsed, you are obliged to confront uncertainty on all sides. As the limits of the

reductive and compartmentalized mode of thinking are revealed more and more, you

have to try to grasp the complex in the literal sense of the word complexus—meaning that

which is woven together. Blaise Pascal, in the 17th century, was already expressing what

ought to be self-evident: 'All things, even the most separated from one another, are

imperceptibly linked one to the other, all things assist and are assisted, cause and are

caused'—an idea that introduced a sense of reciprocity. Pascal continues: “I consider it

impossible to know the parts if I do not know the whole, as it is impossible to know the

whole if I do not know each part individually.” Pascal understood that knowledge was a

shuttle passing from the whole to the parts and from the parts to the whole; it is the link,

the capacity to contextualize, to situate knowledge and information within a context so

that they make sense.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 569

Why is it becoming increasingly difficult for us to use our cognitive skills, which

always function by contextualizing and globalizing? In effect, we are now living in a

global era, and the problems are more interrelated and vast. However, it is especially

true because we are to a greater extent under the influence of disjunctive, reductive and

linear thought. We have disregarded Pascal for Descartes, who advocated breaking down

things into their component parts in order to understand them. As soon as you have

elements that pose problems within a system, we must separate out the problems, solving

the different problems individually and then deriving a solution for the whole. We must

separate science and philosophy and keep disciplines apart, but on condition that they can

link together again. However, today there is a hermetic separation and

compartmentalization of disciplines. There is a disjunction between the humanist culture—

that of the humanities, which made us reflect and enriches us—and the compartmentalized

scientific culture. Truly, this disjunction has spread everywhere, even into politics. It is this

fragmentary mode of thought that dominates and encloses the fragments within the world,

whereas the other form of thought will dissect the world longitudinally in slices related to

economics, technology and so on. This techno-scientific thought, which takes no account of

creatures, people and cultures, is clearly incapable of understanding the problems of these

socio-centric ethnicities; in the same way as socio-centric ethnicities are incapable of realizing

the technical problems. All of which today puts us in a very serious situation.

From this point of view, the imperative is to create connections. Creating connections is

what complex thought strives to do. In the sphere of politics and human activity, my

diagnosis is that we are witnessing a struggle between the forces of association and the forces
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 570

of dislocation. Solidarity or barbarity. We are going to burst asunder from a want of solidarity;

we will burst asunder from a failure to reform our way of thinking.

To what extent is it a problem of thought? To the extent that the classic alternatives

block our thought. Realism and utopia are two contradictions that are mutually exclusive

according to our received way of thinking. If you are a realist, you can't be utopian. If you are

utopian, you are excluded from realism. It is the same thing for unicity and multiplicity. The

proponents of the former can but homogenize everything and unify the world in the abstract.

Those arguing for the latter certainly perceive the world's diversity, but they see it as

compartmentalized. The problem lies in the impossibility of escaping these self-destructive

alternatives and in the impossibility of thinking complexity. But this is the great challenge that

faces us.

Towards an Anthropolitics
Solidarity or barbarity is an alternative that makes sense not only in the immediate, the

concrete, the local, and experienced, but also in the European and global contexts. Wherever

this debate is taking place, it obliges us to line up on the side of the forces of association and

solidarity in the hope that they will prove stronger than the opposing forces of rupture,

dislocation and wilful concealment. It compels us to be part of a movement that, if it is not

broken, perhaps will no longer lead us to the best of all possible worlds, but may usher in the

hope of a better world. Though we must set aside the messianic illusion of a radiant future,

we can nevertheless nourish the hope of such a better world, even while recognizing that this

hope may never be entirely fulfilled. For me, the terrestrial homeland takes shape in the

realization that all human beings are derived from the same trunk, born of the same matrix -

the earth—through our biological evolution. It is the awareness that we share the same
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 571

identity and that, across our cultural diversities made even more apparent since we have

entered the global age, all human beings share the one destiny in relation to the great problems

of life and death.

It was this type of awareness that elicited the consciousness of belonging to a

homeland. Otto Bauer,6 at the end of the 19th century, defined the 'homeland' as a community

of destiny, but included the idea of a common identity across a culture. This identity shared a

common, mythological origin, which was traced back to a common mythic ancestor. However,

in my terrestrial homeland, the ancestor is not at all mythical; rather he is a little bipedal

creature. In him we find the grandfather of all.

These ideas of humanity and an earthly homeland are both very realist, since they are

based on an anthropological identity, but are also very rational given the challenges of life and

death that confront us all. It could even be called religious—in the sense that picks up the

etymological origin of this term (Lat. religio = a binding together)—by binding all humankind

into a fraternity.

Within our nation, as within Europe and throughout the whole world, we are

confronting immense problems. Socialism believed that the ills that afflicted humanity were the

work of a single monster, capitalism: suppress capitalism and all these ills would also be

suppressed. However, we saw that it did not suppress wars, nor did it suppress exploitation.

We realized that there is not just one monster, but a number of them. They are not mini-

monsters, but they are more and more enormous in size: the technobureaucratic monster, the

monster of the uncontrolled spread of technoscience… all these reverberate within daily life

and create deep-seated ills. Our well-being is becoming a situation of ill-being.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 572

We should not forget to diagnose the weakness of political thought of the Left. After

the organic collapse of Marxism, the Left was incapable of rethinking the historical problem

of mankind in society and of envisaging a positive politics of history. When socialism was

formulated in the 19th century, it grew out of an historical perspective. Today, such an

historical perspective is once again necessary.

I am afraid that, in the absence of a single unifying concept, if a sudden and violent

crisis occurred, we would have to suffer catastrophic consequences. If a very great crisis were

to come, we would not be sheltered from its terror. During the great crisis of 1929, which

severly struck Germany and were exacerbated by the context of national humiliation, the

world witnessed the rise of Nazism through legal means. However, the same period saw

Roosevelt's 'New Deal' providing an alternative democratic solution. Perhaps the New Deal

worked was because the United States was a country of immigrants.

We are urged to be vigilant, without opening the door to the improbable. Even

recently we have had great expectations, but of what? There were the expectations of the general

spread of democracy, of the emergence from an economy of constraint and poverty. There

was hope that the United Nations could function properly. Such hopes arose not only in

relation to the demise of the USSR, but also in Africa and Latin America where dictatorships

were falling. However, the springtime of the peoples in 1848 was followed by a terrible

repression. That of the last century has seen a terrible regression.

We can no longer continue to nourish disproportionate hopes, such as those crazy hopes

we had in France at the Liberation of Paris. We were coming out from under the yoke of

Nazism, but our great aspirations were rapidly disappointed. So, does that mean that we are

always likely to be disenchanted, seeing our hopes reduced to despair? In a word, no. I
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 573

believe that we must live to the full the ecstatic moments of history; they are the consolation

of so many years of mediocrity. I experienced the Liberation of Paris. May 1968 was a little

moment of historical delight. I was fortunate to be in Lisbon at the time of the Carnation

Revolution. Unfortunately, I was only able to experience the fall of the Berlin Wall by

proxy, but I was happy to see Rostropovitch playing in front of the Wall.

Life is bearable only if one introduces not a utopia, but poetry, that is, intensity,

celebration, joy, communion, happiness and love. There is a historical ecstasy, a collective

ecstasy of love. Francesco Alberoni, in Falling in Love7 —whose wonderfully untranslatable

Italian title is Innamoramento e amore —describes that marvellous, ecstatic moment when

love comes upon one: 'Nascent revolutions are moments of falling in love.' It's a phrase I

like quoting. But such revolutions are not 'the final struggle', but 'the initial struggle'. I

might even say 'the struggle before the initial struggle'. They are the curtain-raiser, even, to

the initial struggle. Why? Because what is needed is a formidable effort of intellectual

reconstruction, a whole new way of thinking, even; we must show ourselves fit and able to

confront the challenge of the uncertain, and there are two ways by which it may be

confronted. The first is by way of a wager: we have a clear idea of what we want, what we

aspire after, and so we wager on its realization even though we may fear that our ideas will

be defeated. The second is through application of strategy: in other words, the ability, in

terms of information received and chances met, to modify our manner of advancing.

Resistance is not something purely negative. It is not simply opposing oppressive

forces, but it looks ahead to liberations. It is the Polish example, it's the example of the

Soviet people, it's the example of occupied France. Resistance has an inherent virtue. We

are condemned to resist. What I call 'living life' is not just living poetically, it is also
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 574

knowing how to resist in life. Heraclitus said: 'If you do not expect the unexpected, you will not find

it.' We come back to the idea of the possible impossible, which we must explore in depth.

For a long time human beings have said that the earth should be a garden shared

by all humanity. Now what makes a garden beautiful is the cooperation between nature

and culture. A garden is where both cooperate instead of mutually destroying each other.

The co-tutelage of nature and culture are developed there. Among humankind as well, there

should be cooperation between the forces of the conscious and the forces of the

unconscious.

To civilize the earth and make it a garden is a gigantic task. We are only at the

beginning of it. We don't share the same awareness of our common earthly homeland.

Candide, as he withdrew from the world, said: 'I am going to cultivate my garden.' Today,

with the new Candide, we must say: 'The outlook is quite fine, let's try and cultivate our

garden.'

Notes
1. A first version of this text was published under the title "For a realistic utopia" in

Rencontres de Chateauvallon around Edgar Morin , Paris, Arléa, 1996. The present

version was revised in 2005 and is reprinted from Diogenes, 53 (1), Morin, E., Realism

and utopia, 135-144., Copyright (2006), with permission from Sage Publications, Inc.

2. Francois Furet, Le Passé d'une illusion, Paris, ed. Robert Laffont & Calmann-Lévy, 1995,

translated into English as The Passing of an Illusion: The idea of communism in the

twentieth century, trans. Deborah Furet, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 575

3. With the onset of Glasnost, Afanasev contributed actively to 'restoring their past' to the

Soviet people, particularly that of the Stalinist period. He abandoned politics to

devote himself entirely to the Russian State University of Human Sciences, which

he established and of which he became rector. Works: That Great Light in the East

(1989, written in collaboration with Jean Daniel); My Russia of Ill Fate (1992); Russia, the

Crucial Issues of Today (2002) (Editor's note). (None of these appear to have been trans-

lated into English as of 2005: trans.)

4. Born in 1946, Michnik was one of the leading protestors against the Communist regime,

firstly within the precursor movement of 1970, then in 1980 during the

demonstrations which brought the Solidarity trade union and its leader, Lech Walesa,

to the world's attention. Michnik's opposition activities cost him six years in prison.

Today he is editor in chief of the first independent Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza [The

Electoral Gazette], which he founded in 1989. (Editor's note)

5. See, on this subject: Diogenes No. 176 (Winter) 1996, Tolerance between Intolerance and

the Intolerable, edited by Paul Ricceur. (Editor's note)

6. Austrian social-democratic politician (1882-1938). Theoretician and spokesperson

for Austrian Marxism before the First World War. Works: Nationalitätenfrage und

Sozialdemokratie (1907), published in English as The Question of Nationalities and Social

Democracy, trans. Joseph O'Donnell, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2000;

Der Weg zum Sozialismus [The Way to Socialism] (1917), Bolschewismus oder

Sozialdemokratie? [Bolshevism or Social-Democracy?] (1920); Sozialdemokratie, Religion

und Kirche [Social-Democracy, Religion and the Church] (1927) (Editor's note). (The

latter three works do not appear to be available in any English translation: trans.)
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 576

7. Francesco Alberoni, Falling in Love, trans. Lawrence Venuti, New York, Random

House, 1983.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 577

Chapter 28: Future Ethics and Politics

The relationship between ethics and politics, which should be a complementary one, is often

antagonistic. The policy-making of states and governments tends at best to subordinate ethical

considerations to practical concerns of Realpolitik and power politics, and at worst to stifle them

altogether. However, it is not just a matter of politics tending to exclude ethical concerns. Ethics

can also oppose political realism in a variety of ways.

Ethics Against Politics

In the first place, this may take the form of dissidence. Ancient mythology provides us

with an example in the person of Antigone. We have also seen acts of dissidence closer to our

own time. Dissidence corresponds to a demand for justice, for truth or for truth and justice

simultaneously, which would seem like pure folly. It is not by chance that mental homes were

considered suitable places for accommodating dissidents in the former USSR. There was

something apparently insane in the act of dissidence of the young Siniavski when he wrote a

letter to Konsomolskaya Pravda voicing his criticism of the Soviet system. By giving his

address, he was virtually asking to be arrested. Such dissidence may be deemed madness or, even

worse, an absolute crime. In Nazi Germany, a brother and sister—the Scholls—were put to death

in Munich for taking part in student dissidence. From Antigone to Solzhenitsyn, dissidence

seems absurd, unrealistic. Yet I am one of those who think that there is something necessary and

far-sighted in this madness, because it testifies to an ethical imperative irreducible to reason.

As well as dissidence, there is also resistance. Resistance involves the use of political

means to pursue a rebellion that is ethical in character. Of course, such means can go astray and

become unethical, as in the case of terrorism. But it is interesting to note that resistance always

seems unrealistic at the outset. Think of the French Resistance fighters in the summer of 1940,
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 578

when France was totally defeated, conquered by the Nazi armies. That year Europe was entirely

under the heel of Hitler's Germany. Resistance seemed completely unrealistic. Yet, in the two or

three years that followed, it became more and more realistic as hopes of a German defeat were

transformed into a likelihood.

There is also the approach based on the refusal to lie. Something that greatly impressed

me in Solzhenitsyn's letter to the leaders of the USSR was the fact that he simply called on them

not to lie. There are some people who refuse to cooperate with oppression or hypocritical

propaganda by keeping silent.

Political Realism
The notion of political realism should itself be called into question. It is a goal-oriented

realism, and it ends up as a realism that opts for the lesser of two evils. If one thinks that the

domination of Nazi Germany is an accomplished fact that will prove irreversible for several

decades and if one chooses to accept it and salvage what one can from the wreckage, one is

working for the lesser of two evils—in other words, collaborating. This kind of realism always

remains at the surface of reality, which is provisional. History is uncertain and changing. In

1943, there was a turnaround in the situation regarding Hitler's domination, and realism became

lack of realism as the impossible became possible.

In a standardized world, underground forces are at work, what Hegel called the 'old

mole', undermining little by little the bases and foundations of the status quo. The USSR was not

defeated in battle. Its foundations were eroded from the inside.

So ethics are not necessarily unrealistic. Likewise, utopia does not only signify the

impossible. There exists, it is true, a bad utopia, that of a perfect society, totally harmonious,

without conflicts and contradictions. Good utopias are based on possibilities that are not yet

realizable. It would seem impossible today, for political reasons, to feed all the people on the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 579

planet. But it is technically and materially possible. Peace on earth is also a possibility—one that

we may hope to see realized in the next millennium.

In politics, a logic of dialogue is necessary that is to say a complementary and

antagonistic relationship between ethics and politics. The ethical pole must be maintained in

politics. I wish to stress the need for future policy-making to develop the role of ethics in this

dialogue between ethics and politics. There has been much discussion, wholly ambiguous, on the

right of humanitarian intervention. The idea that, for humanitarian reasons, it is right to

transgress some of the ground rules of the current political setup is a forward-looking notion.

The philosopher Jonas has also outlined an ethics oriented specifically towards the future

based on the idea that we are not only responsible to each other for the state of the planet, but are

also responsible to our children and our children's children for the future of the planet. Today,

because of the ecological threat to the biosphere, the nuclear threat and all the other threats

deriving from the latest outbreak of human folly, we must assume our responsibilities towards

the future. We cannot predict the shape of the future, but we can try to avoid disasters of all

kinds so as to improve the lot of humanity.

Towards an Ethics of Humankind

I should like to make a link here between future ethics and 'anthropo-ethics', or the ethics

of humankind. What is the human being? The human being is at once an individual and part of

society and of the human species. However, this does not mean that the human being is 33

percent individual, 33 percent social and 33 percent biological. The relationship is much more

complex. The species is present in the individual. We know that the species can only maintain

itself if two individuals mate. The species is thus genetically present within the individual. But

just as we are in society, so society can be said to be within us. From our birth, society inculcates

in us its language and its culture. The individual and society are therefore inseparable; they
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 580

interpenetrate one another. The relationship is rotational or recursive: individuals are needed to

reproduce the species and produce society, but society is also needed to produce individuals by

endowing them with culture and language.

We may draw from this analysis a number of conclusions for the ethics of the future, as

regards the relationship between society and the individual and that between the individual and

the human species. What is the society that allows for reciprocal control as between individuals

and society? This answer is obviously a democratic society. Democratic society is today

experiencing problems and is regressing in some cases. However, any attempt in the future to

establish an ethical system for society and individuals alike must have democratic society as its

basis. The democratic relationship is the one that offers the individual possibilities of self-

realization. It also accommodates social complexity. Democratic society embodies the plurality

of ideas and opinions, including tolerance of deviance. Working for democracy means working

at one and the same time for individuals and society.

As concerns the relationship between individuals and humankind, it is important to

remember that humanity, understood as the totality of human beings, is today a multidimensional

and not simply a biological notion. Humankind recognizes itself as such in all parts of the planet,

with legitimate cultural and individual differences. The relationship between humankind and the

individual can only flourish in the context of earth citizenship. Techno-economic globalization is

dangerous if checks and balances are lacking. The explosive growth of communications, the

reciprocal influence of cultures on one another, the opening up of cultures to the world at large

and the desire to know one another will ensure the preservation of differences jeopardized by

techno-economic globalization.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 581

Today, the notion of Homeland Earth must encompass that of particular homelands, not

undermine it. The relationship between humankind and the individual requires the development

of an earth citizenship. The citizen is someone with a sense of responsibility and social

solidarity. Médecins San Frontières, Amnesty International, Greenpeace and many other

intergovernmental organizations are movements inspired by earth citizenship.

The future is not scripted. However, we can already discern the outlines of a new logic of

dialogue between ethics and politics, underpinned by democracy and a sense of earth citizenship.

Note
Reprinted from Jérôme Bindé (ed.), The Future of Values: 21st Century Talks., 241-244.,

Copyright (2004), with permission from Berghahn Books.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 582

Chapter 29: The Agents of Double Globalization1

There is both a globalization driven by developments in science, technology, the economy, and

the capitalist system, and a globalization of humanism keynoted by the idea of human rights,

principles of liberty, equality and fraternity, and the idea of democracy and solidarity. Yet the

contemporary world is not a global system but an ever-changing turmoil. It is necessary to

envisage alternative forms of organization, such as a worldwide confederacy. Such aspirations

must take into consideration the notion of the Earth as our common homeland. New ideas are

needed to avoid the grave dangers of an unsustainable and inhuman development. In this regard

an emphasis on the second, humanistic aspect of globalization becomes imperative.

The main agents in the globalization-process are unbridled and anonymous forces, for the

most part free from state restrictions and control. These forces are themselves propelled by

developments in science, technology, economy and capitalism, both serving and being served by

technocrats, experts, economists and executives who, together, form a new international elite.

There is, however, a second globalization which was launched, like the first, at the

beginning of the modern era, which is, at the same time, its ally and its opponent. This is the

globalization of humanism, or the idea of human rights, of the principles of liberty, equality and

fraternity and of the ideas of democracy and human solidarity. The development of this second

form of globalization offers the only effective alternative to technical and economic

globalization.

With the increase in all forms of communication it is now possible to transmit

information to every comer of the globe and thereby promote understanding between people of

different cultures and nationalities. The globalization of mutual understanding is becoming a

vital necessity.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 583

The world is not a global system but a complex, ever-changing turmoil. How could it be

organised? Rather than dreaming of world government and the abolition of nations it is more a

question of envisaging a confederacy of confederations of associated states, each having its own

autonomy. This larger confederacy would be endowed with decisional powers regarding global,

life-and-death matters. This explains the need for the double slogan: autonomy/association.

The confederate ideal is both European and universal. A first stage beyond the United

Nations can only be achieved through confederacy, which would respect autonomies while

suppressing omnipotence. Europe, which has grown in power but has also suffered decline as a

consequence of wars between its nations, is well- qualified to take the first step towards

confederacy. The ideal to be announced to the world is no longer that of the independence of

nations but rather that of a confederacy of nations which would guarantee each member’s

autonomy within a framework of interdependence. Many principles and organisational models

could and should be taken into consideration or, better still, created, with the ultimate aim of

forming a world-wide confederacy.

All aspirations towards humanising globalization must necessarily take into consideration

the idea of the Earth as a common homeland. A homeland is defined by a common origin (real or

mythical), a common identity, and a common destiny. Today, we know that all mankind has a

common origin that it has a common identity in so far as it shares a common nature (though this

nature has a vast potential for diversity) and that it shares a common destiny, created and

developed in the planetary era. The world homeland would safeguard the identity of various

nations which could flourish in a deeper and more extended global context provided they remain

open to the rest of the world. The awareness of belonging to the world homeland is a necessary

condition for this open-minded attitude. This it is not a question of aiming at the demise of the
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 584

United Nations, nor at the construction of a world super-state, but rather of creating national

confederations, of establishing continental and world authorities, both “meta-national” and

“supra-national” for meeting the life-and-death problems facing humanity.

The Agents of Double Globalization

“Globalization” should not be considered an all-embracing term but should rather be confined to

a historical-geographic context— that of the “planetary” era which, from the discovery of

America onwards, has united and continues to unite through communication, interaction and

interdependence, all those aspects of humanity which were hitherto kept apart. "We still live in a

“planetary Iron Age.” Far from being mutually supportive, we live in enmity with one another.

The hoisting of the banners of racial, religious and ideological discrimination inevitably bring

wars, massacres, torture, hatred, and scorn.

The planetary era began with the European domination and colonisation of America,

Asia, and Africa. This process brought with it a chain of globalizing phenomena and mutual

interference such as world-scale economic crises, the two world wars, and the globalization of

natural ideologies and the socialist revolutionary era. Globalization has become more marked

and has increased and accelerated in the second half of our century, undergoing new

developments, particularly in the field of communication. From 1991 onwards the market

economy and capitalism have gained a foothold in the countries of the ex-Soviet Union, in

China, and in the so-called socialist countries of Africa. Europe has opened up its internal and

external economic frontiers. The expansion of the world market has encouraged the globalization

of economic liberalism. The dislocation of enterprises and capital’s freedom to speculate on a

global scale have brought about an effective decline in the control that the countries involved can

exercise over their own economic future.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 585

This economic crisis undoubtedly represents a new stage, but since globalization signifies

a planetarisation and since globalization is the very process through which a planetary,

interdependent reality is constructed, these three terms can be said to coincide and to describe

aspects of the same phenomena. The word “globalization” used with reference to the period

beginning in 1991 and applied solely to the economy, runs the risk of limiting to one dimension

and one period in time a fundamental, historical problem facing the whole world population.

Coming to terms with the unsustainable complexity of world globalization, as the current stage

of planetarisation, consists, as expressed by geographer Jacques Levy, “in the emergence of a

new object, the world as such.” It is imperative, therefore, to come to terms with the world in all

its unsustainable complexity. One must contemplate, at one and the same time, the unity and the

diversity of the planetary process with its complementary and antagonistic aspects. The planet is

not a global system, but a turmoil of constant agitation, lacking a centre of organisation. At

present we have a temporary hegemony (and no one knows how long it will last) but not an

organised world empire, much less a “new world order.”

The collapse of the USSR does not rule out the possibility of Russia’s emergence as a

great world power. The economic development which was limited to the west and Japan until

two decades ago is putting down roots in Asia and Indonesia and expanding rapidly in South

America. Important civilisations are re-emerging such as in China, India, Iran, and the Arab

world. The world is becoming multi-centred, insecure, chaotic, and fragile. As western

technologies and economics continue their triumphal march, their example is followed by non-

western civilisations who thereby affirm their autonomy. In the absence of a central, global point

of reference many different points of reference must be taken into consideration in order to view

the planet in the correct perspective. That is to say—we must abandon a west-centred attitude.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 586

The world is going through a phase of disorganisation/re-organisation and conflicts and

crises. It has begun an unknown adventure in which the present phase is one of decomposition,

non-completion and death pangs but also of new beginnings. It is difficult to foresee its future, if

only for the fact that one cannot yet perceive the extent of processes already set in motion (such

as the ecological counter process which opposes the technological/industrial process and could

modify it or, alternatively, inspire a new process).

Globalization is certainly a unifying force but it is necessary to add that it is conflictual in

nature. The global unification process is more and more often accompanied by its own opposite,

provoked as a counter-effect, that is to say by “balkanisation.” Apart from those of Western

Europe, the new and old nations are closing their horizons—culturally, religiously and

territorially—while opening up economically and technologically. In this case, too, we have

ambivalence. The closing-up processes are regressive, aggressive, and bringers of new wars and

the persecution of minorities. At the same time, however, they safeguard those cultural

differences which are threatened by the homogenizing influence of western civilisation.

The scientific/technical/industrial capitalist developments which are the prime movers of

globalization are, at the same time, producers of new, global threats. These threats fill our skies

with thermo-nuclear weapons and suffocate the earth with the greenhouse effect and damage the

biosphere. Let us add that, together with the worst dangers the world has ever known,

globalization brings the hope of creating a humanity responsible for its destiny. Globalization in

itself represents challenge, opportunity, and danger.

The planet Earth with its biosphere and its human population forms a complex unity. To

what extent might technical/industrial/ economic globalization damage and render sterile our

living environment? Does the biosphere contain powerful regulatory forces capable of
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 587

counteracting the destructive effects of diverse types of damage? Or, on the contrary, are we

heading towards the point of no return and massive destruction?

In any event these processes are destroyers of our old multi- millennial (formerly multi-

centennial) world. We can note the destruction of cultures and civilisations but, as yet, we can

see no new creations—or hardly any. These processes destroy the old world and, in doing so,

they re-awaken former barbarities which were more or less dormant or anaesthetised. The post-

cold war world is a world where the wars are warm indeed. The mammoths of the past are

coming out of hibernation, and fanaticism, nationalism and ethnocentrism are reaching their

boiling points. The world is suffering the pangs of something which could be either birth or

death. Mankind seems unable to give birth to “humanity.”

The Insufficiencies of ‘Economism’ for the Economy

Within the framework of this, complex, contradictory, moribund situation two opposing theories

hold sway, each tending to belittle or simplify the other. According to the first theory the

globalization of liberalism is a blessing for its supporters while it is a curse for its opponents.

For its supporters, economic liberalisation brings not only rationality, efficiency, growth and

market regulation but also generalised development and universal prosperity. Moreover, as a

consequence of the growth and consolidation of interdependence, economic competition

substitutes for armed conflict, thus bringing peace on Earth.

For its opponents economic liberalisation constitutes a new scourge—a new “hydra” that

is threatening mankind. Though I am reluctant to lay all the ills that threaten mankind at the door

of economic liberalism, I feel that the bases and aspirations of this process should be subjected to

radical and critical examination. In the first place, the market cannot be a regulator unless it is,

itself, subject to regulation. As François Rachline has said “a market...is not an unorganised
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 588

assortment of capital flows or of random meetings between its protagonists. It is a stable

structure based on principles and working rules... There can be no market without organised

trading centres, without guarantee or appeal, without specific legislation regarding the

profession, without precisely defined relations between contributors, without financial rules,

without accountancy rules, without advertising, without a large number of agents (not in

competition), without a code of conduct (more or less clearly stated), etc. ...The market is the

product of a long, historical process during which compromises have been reached between

forces and counter-forces.”2

Many of the requisite conditions are lacking in the world market where spontaneous rules

are often blocked by no-less-spontaneous deregulation, as in the case of the “nomadism” of vast

quantities of nebulous, speculative, floating capital, or that of gigantic debts threatening

economically or politically fragile societies or, above all, the sudden and unexpected crises such

as the recent Asiatic crisis. All of these—crises, nomadism, and debts—threaten the world

market itself. Naturally, certain adverse effects could be attenuated or limited, but the system

itself is built on quicksand. Maurice Allais goes even further when he says that the crisis has

already arrived and that it “should oblige us...to totally re-think our monetary, banking and

financial institutions. ...Thoughtless decisions could plunge the world into a situation...

comparable to that of the great depression. The causes are different but the results... could be the

same.”3 There is a need for a new world economic system, new institutional rules and a world

authority (to take over, perhaps, from the UN) capable of enforcing respect for these rules.

Another consequence of the economic, industrial development in the Asian world is the

unlimited exploitation of workers who have no political or trade union rights. In the democratic

west the trade union movement has established a dialogue—both antagonistic and
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 589

complementary—with capital, resulting in the achievement of workers’ rights, pay rises and

better living standards. All of these have, in turn, benefited the capitalist economy by favouring

an increase in consumption. Today, decentralisation has taken production to places where

workers have no union rights and are underpaid— particularly in the “socialist” countries which

have become a paradise for capitalism whilst remaining a hell for slave-workers—and low-cost

mass production is threatening the west-European economy and its social protection system,

while creating temporary beneficial effects for non-western economies.

In the long run, one can foresee positive economic results and new economic

developments, but one can also envisage that these results could be socially and culturally

destructive, destroying societies dedicated to accelerated development, breaking old rules

without creating new ones and hastening the destruction of cultural diversity—a diversity which

inter-racial alliances can only compensate in the absence of racial, ethnic or religious prejudice.

To sum up, it all boils down to a basic criticism: world economic liberalism is founded

upon a world concept which is doctrinaire, linear, quantified, and one-dimensional. It perpetuates

an optimistic view of history which has lost all credibility. It dismisses as superstition anything

regarding identity, singularity or cultural traditions, and considers the first rebellions against to

be the dying struggles of an out-of-date world, never dreaming for one moment that they could

be the herald of future opposition movements. It is incapable of imagining that its negative

effects could become of prime importance and could provoke counter-effects, unleashing

subterranean forces which were believed to be held in check.

At this point, one must acknowledge the inanity of economism’s three dogmas:

1. The idea that economic growth can only be seen from an economic viewpoint—whereas

it should also be considered from cultural, social, and human viewpoints.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 590

2. The idea that wealth and prosperity automatically signifies peace—when neither the First

nor the Second World War were directly caused by economic crises.

3. The idea of unlimited development. We have already learned that beyond certain limits,

industrialisation causes ecological damage, threatening the biosphere and mankind as a

whole. We must realise that development itself creates as many problems as it solves and

that it leads to a profound crisis in civilisation which affects the prosperous western

societies. As it is conceived at present, development, even so-called “sustainable”

development, will be unsustainable, in the long run.

To Regulate? To Decelerate?
One can, in fact one must, envisage adjustment, deceleration, regulation and even, to a relative

degree, the control of economic globalization, but the regulation and deceleration can only be on

a global scale.

Let us make clear first of all that deceleration and regulation could result from an excess

of regulation and acceleration which, by causing turbulence and crises here and there, can

provoke awareness and corrective measures. Every crisis provokes new levels of awareness but,

at the same time, sparks off a search for scapegoats or for magical or mythical solutions and, in

doing so, produces new forms of blindness. Having said this, I must admit that I believe that

deceleration can only be brought about by crisis.

Furthermore, it is easy to imagine that all those who possess a global-scale organisation

find it in their interest to avoid upheavals which might threaten their existence. In any event, “the

accelerated globalisation of trade in every sector will pose problems which only an international

authority will be able to solve” (Boutros-Boutros Ghali).4 Let us say, first of all, that it is

necessary to envisage a sort of ‘security council’ devoted to the examination of the interactions
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 591

of the economic, social and cultural problems posed by globalization. One might certainly

foresee, within the framework of this authority, a commission devoted to economic problems,

another to social problems and a third to cultural problems, but it is important not to split up the

study of the disorganiser-re-organiser complex which constitutes the very process of

globalization.

Four years ago, Mhabub Ul Haq, in a UN report on human development, proposed the

creation of a security council for development: a flexible forum of 22 people who would

determine the guidelines of world economic and social policy. He proposed a governing of the

world—and not a world government. He proposed the key theme of “human development”

which goes beyond “sustainable development.” But the notion of “human development” requires

further elaboration.5

Can we look further ahead? “There where danger grows, grows also that which saves”,

said Holderlin. The danger is there.

The alternative to the dangers of globalisation could only be rupture, or an international

trade recession. A large-scale economic recession would affect all mankind. We would find

ourselves condemned to balkanisation, to ethnical and national solutions alone and to the

recommencement of the ancestral cycle of wars, only this time in a context of bazookas and

thermo-nuclear weapons.

The real alternative would be the development of a second globalization. A policy for the

second globalization will not merely have as its aim the formation of one or more regulatory

institutions at its head but should be animated by world-scale public-spiritedness. This public-

spiritedness has already made its appearance under various guises: the genuinely civil

organisations from ‘Citizens of the World’, founded by Gary Davis immediately after WW II, to
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 592

the ‘Club of Rome’, the “Alliance for a responsible and supportive world”, the ‘Club of

Budapest’, the Gorbachev Foundation, the humanitarian associations such as “Medicins sans

Frontieres,” the associations in defence of human rights such as Amnesty International, the

associations in defence of threatened minorities such as “Survival International,” the associations

to safeguard the biosphere from ‘Greenpeace’ onwards, the many and multiform

nongovernmental organisations, veritable mediums for the culture of ideas and activities, and the

proliferation among the poorer areas of the world of initiatives regarding rural and urban

solidarity. All of this shows that worldwide public-spiritedness, while embracing the

humanitarian dimension, has gone beyond it to encompass the full human dimension.

A New Approach
We must not forget that a new approach is indispensable for the second globalization. Economic

liberalism derives, in fact, from a thought-structure which is fruit of the hyperspecialisation of

knowledge with a consequent decline in general culture and the loss of the faculty of

understanding fundamental global problems. Neo-liberal ideas constitute the economist variation

on the one-dimensional, fragmented, disjunctive and limiting ideas which dominate the world

today. This is a way of thinking common to the managing elites of technocrats, econocrats,

managers, and projectless politicians. These elites live in a rarefied, closed-in world where only

the “real” is quantifiable. They believe they are driving the unstoppable engine of progress. They

have not acquired a sense of measure or limit. They know of no virtues save those related to the

management of major companies, to technical innovation, and to the rationality of the market.

These self-satisfied elites are convinced that they hold the answer to the questions posed

by history, that they are operating for the general good. They ask populations to trust in their

benevolent optimism. Not only has a new, social division been created in this way, but also an
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 593

intellectual division has arisen between this elite with its computer-brain and all those who are

not only repulsed by the new economic developments, but who are, quite simply, trying to come

to terms with reality, with uncertainty about the future. The ideology of these elites obeys a

quantitative logic which refuses to take into consideration what is experienced and felt. As

Aurelio Peccei and Disaku Ikado have said, “the ‘reductionist’ approach which consists in

referring to a single series of factors in order to regulate all the problems posed by the multiform

crisis we are going through at present, far from being a solution, seems to be the problem itself.”

Given that the technocratic, managerial, economic and political elites are cast in the same

ideological mould and obey the same paradigm of disjunction/reduction which extends its rule

over intellectuals and simple citizens alike (who have no way of opposing this process save

through ethnocentrism, nationalism or archeo-Marxism) so only a fundamental change in

approach will allow complex intelligence and planetary awareness to develop among both ilites

and citizens.6 Only this new approach will enable local and global antagonists to be guided by a

unifying idea which will prevent them from excluding each other.

Prospects and Aims for a Common Home

The confederate ideal is both European and universal. A first stage beyond the United Nations

can only be achieved through confederacy, which would respect autonomies while suppressing

omnipotence. The confederate world should be both politically and culturally polycentral and a-

central. The West, which is becoming more provincial, feels a need for the East, while the East

tends to become more westernised. From now on an exchange of ideas between east and west

should become complementary as both are aware of a lack of foundations. Those minds

incapable of grasping the idea of the oneness of the many and the multiplicity of the one can only

promote either a homogenising form of unity, or multiplicities which are separate, distinct and

closed-in upon themselves.7 A complex imperative requires us to safeguard the diversity of

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 594

cultures and develop the cultural unity of humanity. The inter-racial encounters of ideas,

cultures, and ethnic groups are creators of diversity and innovation. Unity, encounters and

diversity must take the place of homogenisation and closure to outside influences. Mutual trust

should take the place of disjunction and lead to ‘symbiosophy’—the wisdom to live together.

Inter-racial encounter does not simply signify the creation of new diversity. It becomes,

in the planetary process, both product and producer of mutual trust and unity. It introduces

complexity into the heart of mixed identity—cultural or racial. Naturally, in the ‘planetary’ era

everyone can and must cultivate his or her ‘polyidentity’, which integrates family identity,

regional identity and continental and ‘planetary’ identity. But the person of mixed race can find

at the roots of his polyidentity a family bi-polarity, and ethnical bi-polarity, and a national or

even continental bi-polarity which confer upon him a complex and complete human identity.

Rationality and realism anchor us to the Earth. This small, lost planet is our only

motherland, our only home and our only garden in the glacial immensity of the constellation-

filled cosmos. The two holes in the ozone layer which have formed in the Arctic and the

Antarctic, the “Greenhouse effect” provoked by the increase in CO2 in the atmosphere, the

massive destruction of the vast, tropical rain forests which produce our oxygen, the increasing

barrenness of our vital, food-producing oceans, seas and rivers, the innumerable sources of

pollution and the unlimited catastrophes, all show us that our planet is in danger.

At the same time the Earth represents the myth in which our destiny is rooted. In the

words of Ricoeur, “the ‘Earth’ is here more than, and other than, a planet. It is the mythical name

of our bodily anchorage to the world”, (Soi-même comme un autre p. 178). The appeal to an

Earth-mother is the secular appeal to that strong, tel¬luric power which was symbolised by the

great Earth goddesses.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 595

Lastly, mutual trust and dependency among humans and trust and dependency upon the

Earth itself take on a religious significance because they constitute a religion of trust. This

religious sense, however, while having its genealogical roots in the great, universal religions

(which it does not intend to replace, however) diverges from the latter and takes on a thoroughly

secular character owing to the absence of God and of worship.

Thus we have set out upon a number of different paths which could converge in the

future: planetary civism, confederate movements, the constitutions of world authorities, a new

approach, and awareness of, and sentiment for, our homeland Earth. Only then would the

development of world citizenship and widespread inter-dependence succeed in formulating an

objective which, for the moment, is impossible: that of civilising the Earth. Only then would

economic globalization represent just one dimension in a multi-dimensional process—a driving

force but not the only one in the formation of a complex civilization on a planetary scale where

the idea of humanity can finally take shape.

The Earth in Danger

Throughout history we have often seen the possible becoming impossible, and also that rich

human potential remains unfulfilled. But we have also observed that the impossible—the self-

destruction of totalitarianism—can become possible and can take place. We have often written

that our only hope is the impossible. Heraclitus, in the same breath in which he acknowledged

that the unhoped-for is “unobtainable and inaccessible”, added “if you do not hope you will not

find the unhoped-for.”

We are still living in an age of generalised impotence, but we have entered an age of

general awareness to two fatal threats which are becoming more and more consistent and

increasingly call for urgent measures.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 596

Figures and studies confirm with increasing clarity that the global temperature has

increased in the last two decades,8 that this heating- up process is accelerating, and that it is

caused by the emission of gas, in particular of carbonic and methane gas, which are the direct

product of the energy-generation and manufacturing. Since the emission of gas is increasing in

most of the industrialised countries (10% in the USA and 11% in France) and also in the

developing countries, particularly in Asia, it will become more and more obvious over the next

ten years that the development process has become not only a source of catastrophe, but is also

unsustainable. The emergency measures are well-known and they correspond exactly to what we

call a civilisation policy.9 Already a certain number of scares concerning the food supply—for

example the mad cow disease—encourage the substitution of quality for quantity, but further

steps must be taken. It will be necessary to revolutionise our life-style, our production methods,

and our consumer habits in order to live and to live well.

At the same time the international commission on nuclear disarmament, instituted on the

initiative of the Canadian government, maintains that the next six or seven years are particularly

dangerous. Nuclear weapons are being disarmed in the USSR and the United States but a general

agreement for their destruction has not yet been reached. Asia has entered and era of nuclear

alert with atomic explosions in India and Pakistan, and with the nuclear arsenals of China, Israel

and, perhaps soon, Iran and Iraq. Underground deposits of vitrified uranium, like those in

Kazakhstan, could be de-vitrified and mined by a fundamentalist power. Trafficking in

plutonium and uranium enables not only mad dictators but also terrorist groups to use nuclear

weapons. The complex checks and balances of a closely interdependent world economy would

be unable to withstand the shock of climatic/ecological disasters, and a devastating economic

crisis would further aggravate the outcome.

 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 597

It is a sad fact that one of these catastrophes will probably be necessary in order to spark

the constitution of a world authority to safeguard human health and accelerate the awareness of

world citizenship. The driving force may only be the fear of suicide. Processes in the coming

twenty years could become explosive. Everything points towards a debut of the new

millennium’s marked by barbarism, devastating crises, and the continual threat of dramatic

recession.

The Die Has Not Been Cast Yet

Marx said, “it is not enough for the idea to approach reality, reality must approach the idea.”

Today we do have this two-way movement. Real globalizing forces are approaching the idea of

world citizenship, and this idea can approach reality by giving a sense of planetary brotherhood

and mutual understanding to forces of unification and communication at work in this century.

But there is also a movement of “reality” in the opposite direction—towards fragmentation,

barbarism, and catastrophe.

We do not yet know whether globalization is the last opportunity, or the last misfortune,

of humankind.

Notes
1. Reprinted from World Futures: The Journal of General Evolution, 53 (2), Morin, E. The

agents of double globalization. 149-163., Copyright (1999), with permission from World

Futures and Taylor and Francis.

2. Rachline, F. (1996). Services publics, économie de marché. iParis: Presses de la

Fondation nationale des sciences politiques.

3. Allias, M. (1993, August 2). Liberation.

4. AFP Reuters. (1996, July 27). “Very strong concern” of the United States. Le Monde.
 Running Head: CONFRONTING COMPLEXITY 598

5. cf. Morin, E. (1994). Le developpement de la crise du developpement. Sociologie Points,

439-456.

6. cf. Morin, E. (1995). La Methode 4, Les Idees, chapitre paradigmatologie. Paris: Le

Seuil, Point essaís.

7. In “Terre-Patrie,” I had suggested that a culture should be both open and closed—closed

to protect its identity—open to assimilated and integrate new ideas.

8. cf. The United Nations Conference on climatic change held in July 1996 in Geneva

where a North Canadian Inuit disclosed the thinning of the Arctic ice and a month

previously a study in the same zone had shown that the area of permanently frozen

ground in the Arctic regions had receded by 100 kilometres and become shallower.

According to an international group for the study of cli-matic evolution, the world’s

average temperature could increase by 1 to 3.5 degrees.

9. cf. Morin, E. & Naor, S. (1997). Politique de civilisation. Paris: Arlea.

Chapter 30: European Civilization: Properties and
Challenges1
From Europa to Europe
What was called the Europe at the outset is not Europe at all. The Greeks applied the name to the

unfamiliar continent north of their country in the seventh century BC, raising questions even

then. Herodotus wondered that his compatriots gave the region the name, of the young woman,

daughter of the Phoenician king, whom Zeus had abducted to Crete. The Greeks, of course, turned

their back on the continent and knew only the Mediterranean, which became the thriving center

of trade and traffic in the Roman Empire. While Rome conquered maritime Spain, Portugal,

Gaul and England, it collided vainly at the center of the continent with indomitable Germania.

Europe was a shapeless northern area beyond the known world of Antiquity. Although

populated since ancient prehistoric times, the region had not yet entered history, at a time when

the Roman Empire was already starting to decline. Europe would take part in the jumble of

barbarian invasions that poured from east to west and from north to south, the hordes chasing

one another, crowding together, fighting, overlapping, mixing, and finally causing the West

Roman Empire to disintegrate (AD 476). A chaos of barbaric kingdoms would hold power from

the fifth to the seventh centuries, the Eastern Empire aside, forming a large patchwork of

imputations, some arising from the tuff of prehistory, some Latinate, others Germanic, and some

finally Asian.

It is from these peoples that a mosaic of innumerable ethnic groups, set in extraordinarily

disparate territories, would gradually gel and diversify. Thus, the structure of Europe consisted

from the start of an ethnic miscellany on which the centuries wove the shapes and figures of the
continent's history; an ethnic miscellany that survives, and is even finding new life, despite the

asphyxiating pressure of the modern states.

One cannot therefore define historical Europe by its geographic borders. And one cannot

define geographical Europe by stable and closed historical borders. This, however, does not

imply Europe’s dilution in its environment. It means that Europe, like all important notions, is

not defined by its borders, which are vague and unsettled, but rather through what organizes it

and is responsible for its originality.

Europe not only lacks real borders, it also lacks internal geographic unity. One might then

say that its originality lies in its very lack of unity: the inland part of the peninsula offers a great

variety of landscapes, due jointly to the broken relief the multifarious interlocking of land and

sea, as well as to the diversity of climate. Nothing destined Europe to become a historical entity.

Yet, it became one. In what way? When? How?

Europe originated from no initial founding principle. The Greek principle and the Latin

principle arose from its periphery and antedate Europe; the Christian principle came from Asia

and blossomed in Europe only at the end of its first millennium. All these principles would have

to be agitated, shaken, mixed in the confusion of the invading and the invaded, of latinized,

germanicized, and slavicized peoples, before associating or opposing one another. If one looks

for Europe's essence, one discovers only an evanescent and antiseptic "European spirit’. If one

points to what seems an authentic feature, one obscures an opposite and no less European one.

Thus, if Europe is law, it is also might; if it is democracy, it is also oppression; if it is spirituality;

it is also materiality; if it is measure, it is also hubris, or excessiveness; if it is reason, it is also

myth, persisting even within the idea of reason.

 Europe is an uncertain notion, born of confusion, with vague borders, a shifting

geometry; and subject to slippage, breaks and metamorphoses. What is therefore needed is to

probe the idea of Europe precisely where it is uncertain, blurred, and contradictory so as to reveal

its complex identity.

Europe’s barbaric period was also the period when it became Christian. The missionizing

of the barbarians marked its first success with the conversion of Clovis (496) and would spread

through the interior of the continent to reach its full expansion in the seventh century. At that

point, a European identity seems to emerge along with a Christian identity. However,

Christianity is neither originally nor distinctively European. This religion, which came from

Judaea, first spread throughout Asia Minor, then to both sides of the Mediterranean; only much

later would it permeate Europe, It was the Arab conquest that, in Islamicizing the Near East and

North Africa, would limit, partition, and hem in Christianity in Europe for centuries. We can thus

say that in a first instance Islam made Europe by its containment of Christianity (seventh

century), and that in a second instance Europe made itself against Islam by turning back Islam’s

might at Poitiers (732).

The concept of Europe enjoyed a fleeting boost in the immediate aftermath of Poitiers.

Thirty years after the battle, Isidore the younger, a Spaniard, would write: "Leaving their houses

in the morning, the Europeans could see the neatly aligned tents of the Arabs." And when

Charlemagne was consecrated emperor in 800, he was called the venerable chief of Europe, and

the “father of Europe”. But after his death, the idea of Christianity absorbed the idea of Europe,

and the factions within Christianity corroded it; the term seems to have disappeared until the

fourteenth century.
 Yet, Islam would goad and haunt Europe. The Islamic conquest, by driving Christianity

out of Asia Minor and North Africa, would Europeanize Christianity. And Islam’s retreat, from

Poitiers to the fall of Granada, permanently Christianized Europe. Furthermore, the

establishment of Islam on the southern shore of the Mediterranean would isolate and turn Europe

in on itself. A millennial path of communication for the world of Antiquity; the Mediterranean

became for a decisive time the “liquid barrier" which, as Henri Pirenne (1958) emphasized

perhaps excessively, would turn Europe inward on its continental mass. Though the short-term

effect of being cut off at the Mediterranean was disastrous, even asphyxiating for the European

economy, in the long term it allowed northwestern Europe to awaken and stimulated continental

Europe to exchange and commerce. This removal from sea to land recalls the ocean’s retreat

during the Mesozoic, when fish were left stranded on the shores, at first gasping for air, but then,

through the transformation of their breathing systems, adapting to terrestrial life. Likewise the

European economy, formerly aquatic, became amphibious. An Arabic-Berber Spain had sprung

up. It offered and even imposed on Catholic Spain a religious plurality that included Muslims,

Jews and Christians. Was a multi-religious Europe possible? The Catholic kings, who were

masters of all Spain after the fall of Granada (1492) would immediately expel unconverted

Muslims and Jews from the country; for a long time imposing religious monolithism on Europe.

Only the Jews would survive this, here and there, in constantly menaced small ghettos.

Triumphant Christianity turned in arrogantly on itself, hounding out and eradicating all doubt

and heresy. The Christian monopoly over belief and thought would hold sway in medieval

Europe.

The Christian reconquest stopped at Gibraltar and did not extend beyond Europe. The

crusades (1095-1270) had already failed in their attempt to reinstate Christianity in its land of
origin. The crusaders were perceived - by themselves and also by the Byzantines and Muslims -

as Franks, not Europeans. In actuality, the crusades do not represent Europe’s first attempt at

external colonization, but Christianity’s refusal to be imprisoned within Europe, so far from its

native soil. Then Europe had to abandon Byzantium and the Balkans to the Turkish conquest

(fifteenth century). At that very moment, the onset of the Modern Era would disrupt the identity

between Europe and Christianity, with the Americas opening to Christianity and Europe opening

to secular thought. Thus only medieval Europe can be identified with Christianity.

There was of course extensive circulation at the capillary level between the Islamic world

and Christian Europe, with the latter benefiting from the strong economic and cultural influence

of the Islamic civilizations in the first flush of their greatness (ninth to eleventh centuries)

(Lombard 1971).2 Even during the crusades, clandestine cultural influences were at work,

proceeding from the highly civilized Arabs to the rough-hewn Frankish knights, for several

centuries, via Islamic Spain, medieval thought was irrigated by translations from the Greek and

the works of Arab mathematicians, indispensable inputs to the flourishing of the modern era. But

the legacy of this period was a closure of minds on either side between Europe and the Islamic

world, reactivated in the fifteenth and sixteenth century as a fear of the Turks. In contemporary

times, secularized Europe and the Islamic world, building on the old closure, once more shut

themselves off to each other, with Islam finding new energy in resisting the Europeanization of

its mores and the corruption of its Muslim identity.

Modern Europe shaped itself by losing the Old World (fall of Byzantium, 1453), by

discovering the New World (1492), and by changing world views (Copernicus, 1473-1543). Two

centuries later, Europe would change the world.

 European navigators from Henry the Navigator to Vasco da Gama and Magellan

reconnoitered the coasts of Africa and discovered the road to India via the Cape of Good Hope

(1498); the conquerors then explored and colonized North and South America. The earth was

truly round and the planetary era had begun. Modern Europe appeared by metamorphosis, like a

winged insect emerging from its chrysalis and taking flight out into the world. What had been

gestating at the end of the Middle Ages took on new form and strength. There now appeared

monarchical states, the urban middle classes, and mercantile, financial, and even industrial

capitalism. Medieval Europe already harbored breaks and ruptures within itself. Modern Europe

caused Christianity to burst and was in turn shaped in and through this bursting.

There was the bursting of the Reformation, which spread through Germany, England,

Switzerland, the United Provinces, and Scandinavia; whereas Spain, Italy. Portugal, part of

France, Bavaria, and Austria remained Catholic. There was the gushing of speeches, ideas, and

news in the swarm of printed pages spewed in all directions by Gutenberg’s invention (1440).

There was the bursting of the Renaissance, from the contact of Faith and Reason, or Religion and

Humanism. Thereafter, Judeo-Christiano-Latino-Greck culture ceased to form a symbiotic unit,

securely wrapped in a cocoon of theology; each of its constituents became, not just

complementary but at odds with all the others. There was the bursting on the economic, social,

and cultural levels; the development of bourgeois civilization erected a new type of society by

undermining the archaic, rural, feudal, religious, customary, and communitarian foundations of

the old society. There was finally the bursting of Europe into national states, each ruling over its

constituent ethnic groups, the principal ones being Spain, England, France, Austria, Sweden,

and, before long, Russia. Thus a polycentric Europe came into being, marked by the war of one

against all.
 These multiple burstings occurred in reaction to the pressure of anarchic processes and in

turn favored their growth. The mushrooming of cities, the proliferation of trade, commercial and

capitalist competition, and the development of sovereign states arose within and through the

struggle of one against all. Everything seems to have been chaos and conflict in the birth of the

Modern Era; the warring of the classes, the warring of nations, the warring of religions, the

warring of ideas. Antagonisms erupted everywhere, with their attendant instability and reversals.

War became the inevitable concomitant of the nation-state. Economic crises swept Europe. The

gold pouring in from America brought prosperity, bankruptcy and delirium.

Thus modern Europe is the product of a metamorphosis, and it has continued to live by

metamorphoses; from a Europe of states to a Europe of nation-states; from a balance-of-powers

Europe to a Europe of chaos and violence; from a trading Europe to an industrial Europe; from

an apogean Europe to an abyssal Europe; from a Europe mistress of all the world to a province

Europe under guardianship. Thus, Europe’s identity is to be defined not despite its

metamorphoses, but in its metamorphoses. This metamorphic identity subsists in the accelerating

change that, in a unique and prodigious way, characterizes European history from the fifteenth to

the twentieth century, a time Europe experienced as a devastating cyclone. Modern Europe has

never lived except in motion. Its being has never been other than as accelerated change.

Since the fifteenth century, Europe has been at the very center of history’s whirlwind, a

locus of intense political, military, economic, civilizational, and cultural activity. From that time

on, one referred to “peace in Europe" or “war in Europe". With the spread of court etiquette,

bourgeois morality, and eventually modern comfort and technological advances, there, was more

and more reference to “European civilization". As the rest of the world was better explored, the

sense of belonging to Europe grew stronger. This sense of belonging is critically visible in the
comparisons by eighteenth century philosophers between European brutality and depravity and

the innocence of the Noble Savage or the wisdom of the Chinese mandarin. The Romantics may

have looked nostalgically to the organic communities of the Middle Ages and of early

Christianity, but in the nineteenth century, the sense of belonging to Europe was felt with greater

and greater satisfaction. Toward 1800, the term “Europeanism” appears, referring to a taste for

things that were particularly European. Then, toward 1830, came the verb “to Europeanize",

voicing Europe’s understanding that it brought the

highest civilization to the rest of the world.

Europe’s superiority complex over all other civilizations then arrogantly asserted itself. It

is not only non-European civilizations that appeared backward, but non-European races were

considered inferior as well. At the end of the nineteenth century, during its last spasms of

colonization and its final moments of world hegemony, Europe believed it had been given the

mission of bringing true civilization to the savages, barbarians, and primitive peoples of the

world. And Europe entertained the Kiplingesque myth of the white man’s superiority, the best of

the best of whom was the tall blond Aryan. This racism, at first primarily Anglo-Saxon but later

Germanic, dissolved all European solidarity in one stroke, as illustrated by the aggravated form

nationalism then took and the unbridled rivalry that sprang up over colonies, markets, raw goods,

and Lebensraum.

In contrast to the nationalism of European countries, a nationalism whose attendant

belligerence was becoming increasingly clear, the dream of a United States of Europe -

spectrally prefigured in the utopias of the seventeenth century (William Penn, the abbé de Saint-

Pierre) and in Kant’s “project for permanent peace" - now took on substance as a system of ideas

in which were commingled the emancipation of nationalities, republican democracy, and a

European federation. Victor Hugo prophesied in grandiose terms the advent of a United States of

Europe, itself only a herald of the forthcoming reconciliation of humankind. Europeanism,

federalism, cosmopolitanism, and internationalism would further weave this dream into the

fabric of the late nineteenth century.3

At the beginning of the twentieth century, socialist internationalism and European

fraternity even seemed sufficiently powerful to prevent a Franco-German war. But, in fact, the

great French and German socialist parties joined their countries’ sacred patriotic union during the

summer of 1914. Lenin concluded in 1915 that the federation of Europe could never occur

without a revolution. After 1918, the idea of a United States of Europe and the Bolshevik idea of

internationalism went in different and opposing directions. All hope of confederating Europe

went up in smoke in 1933 with Hitler’s accession to power. The Second World War was

preceded and accompanied by terrible confusion, resulting from the dash between an originally

internationalist but now nationalist Soviet communism and Nazism, ever racist and pan-

Germanic, but claiming after 1940 the mission of unifying Europe. In 1945, over Germany’s

corpse, two half-Europes saw the light of day.

Europe was a notion with vague territorial boundaries and changing historical borders.

Today it is the boundaries of civilizations that are vague, since European civilization has flooded

and continues to flood the rest of the world. Even when the cultures and religions of Asia or

Africa try to resist Europe and combat its onslaught, they nonetheless borrow its formula for the

nation-state and develop sciences, technology, and arms originating from Europe. In the end, it

was not just the original fruits of the Whirlwind that spread throughout the world: now the

Whirlwind itself has become planetary. Of course Europe is still caught and shaken in it but its

center has moved elsewhere, where it has acquired a new scale and a new nature.
 What is left of Europe? What remains of this multinuclear, polycentric, geo-historical,

civil national, and cultural complex which existed only through conflicts and communications,

through resistance to political and cultural hegemony? There remains the very rich diversity of

its transnational cultures (Germanic, Latin, Slavic) and of its national cultures, each marked by

an original language. There also remains an extraordinary variety of micro-cultures, a fruit of the

micro-ethnic texture of Europe after the last invasions - riches that survive because the project of

national unity was never completed, even in such very ancient nations as France and England.

In comparison to the immense cultural spaces of the Asian or American world, Europe

now appears like a system of small cultural compartments that are local, regional, provincial, and

national in nature. True, taking the United States as an example, one cannot say that California is

the same as New England, nor that Georgia is the same as Wisconsin, but in spite of the

enormous geographic distances between, them they share more common cultural substance than

Brittany and Provence, than Flanders and Euzkadi, and of course than Portugal and Austria, than

Italy and Sweden.

Are only diversity and plurality European? Might there not also be a foundation, a unity,

a principle of order and organization that correspond to our needs of today? And yet the

foundation of Europe is its loss of foundations (the Empire, the Mediterranean, Christianity);

Europe’s order is the disorder of a tumultuous building site. Europe has never been itself except

in self-organizing anarchy and has never existed as an organization superior to its constituents.

Hence the staggering problem we now face, which is to search in the present and not in the past

for Europe’s organizing principle. But to do so we may draw on the historical principle that links

Europe’s identity to change and metamorphosis. And it would just be the vital necessity of

rescuing its identity that calls Europe to a new metamorphosis.

The Cultural Whirlwind
European culture is rightly considered to be Judeo-Christiano-Greco-Latin. Jewish, Christian,

Greek, and Latin sources appear to have come together to 'form a harmonious synthesis, which is

at once the specific substrate of Europe and its common denominator. It is starting from this base

that Europe has produced an original civilization, marked by spirituality, humanism, rationality,

and democracy virtues and values, that is, superior to those of any other civilization.

Such is the myth Europe entertains about itself. If the myth contains an indisputable truth,

it is a mutilated truth, raise by its very mutilation, amputated from an opposite and inseparable

truth. Its nature is to color with euphoria and self-satisfaction a delusive truth. As Jean-Baptiste

Duroselle very aptly wrote:

When someone tells me that Europe is the land of the right and true, I think of all that is

arbitrary; that it is the land of human dignity I think of racism; that it is the land of reason

I think of the Romantic reverie. And find justice in Pennsylvania, human dignity among

Arab nationalists, reason everywhere in the universe, if it is true, as Descartes has said,

that common sense is the most evenly divided thing in the world.

(Duroselle 1965: 318)

I spoke of culture in invoking the Judeo-Christiano-Greco-Latin substrate and I spoke of

civilization in invoking humanism, rationality, science, and freedom. These two terms, which often

overlap in French, are clearly distinguished in German thought; where culture refers to what is

singular and specific in a society, whereas civilization applies to what can be acquired and

transmuted from one society to another. Culture, in the sense that it defines a genus, is generic,

whereas civilization is generalizable: culture develops by returning to its roots and being loyal to

its singular principles, civilization by accumulating what it has acquired, that is, by progressing.
 I am forced here to straddle the two concepts. Thus, I will maintain the distinction

between European culture, singular in its Judeo-Christiano-Greco-Latin texture and European

civilization, whose humanism, science, and technology have spread outside Europe and become

planted in utterly different cultural contexts. But - and here a complexity - humanism,

rationalism, and science were, in their beginnings and early development, phenomena specific to

European culture, only later becoming transmissible and universalizable phenomena of

civilization, capable of being integrated by outside cultures, which the influence of the new

civilization would in turn modify. Culture and civilization can, therefore, according to the

situation, join and overlap to permute.

These two terms are typical products of European civilization/culture. The words came

into use at the end of the eighteenth century, at first in the singular: civilization stands in

opposition mainly to barbarism, while culture stands in opposition to nature. Culture and

civilization define two polarities: the singularity, subjectivity, and individuality of the first

contrast with the transmissibility, objectivity, and universality of the second. The terms would be

used in the plural during the second half of the nineteenth century, when cultures and

civilizations older than our own came to be recognized. From the nineteenth to the beginning of

the twentieth century, German thought put a premium on the term culture, which expresses the

specific genius of a people, and French thought put a premium on the term civilization, a benefit

that can be spread to all peoples because it derives from the universality of reason. Aware of the

complex relations between these two terms, and because of the very nature of my proposals, I

will not dwell on their contrasting aspects or, more particularly, on the demarcation between

them. No terminological rigor is possible where no clear boundaries exist, or worse, where there

is a likelihood of permutation between culture and civilization. So I will allow my vocabulary to

float in these hazy zones and, according to the subconscious connotative pressures guiding my

pen, will use now one and now the other term for the productions/products of European thought

such as Humanism, Reason, and Science. However, I will, retain the term culture for what relates

specifically to ethnic groups, provinces, and nations. This will help us understand at the end of

the day that if the culture or Europe, in spreading throughout the world, has become Civilization,

European cultures are today threatened by the very civilization that came from Europe (Delmas

1980).

Finally, I must return to the meaning of the term dialogic, essential for grasping the very

identity of European culture, which both produces and is the product of the complementarity,

competition, and antithesis between different ideas, theories, conceptions, and visions of the

world. The state of conflict is inadequately expressed by the term, dialogue. The term dialectic is

inadequate to express the strong persistence of dualistic opposition within unity. The term

dialogic is therefore essential to my theme but its constant repetition may lull the reader into

insensibility rather than make him aware of what constitutes the originality of European culture.

While Western Europe, in the Middle Ages was still divided into fiefdoms and was

starting to be divided into states, Christianity nonetheless represented a cultural sphere in which

trans-European artistic currents circulated: the Romanesque, for instance (eleventh century), and

the Gothic (thirteenth century). Thus, as early as the eleventh century Europe nurtured an intense

exchange of ideas.

Scholars communicated in Latin, the only recognized cultural language, which would

remain in use in philosophy until the fifteenth century. Great centers of learning sprang to life in

the eleventh century: the universities. First to be created was Bologna University, followed by

other great centers of memory, of knowledge, of thought, and of debate in Valencia (1209),
Oxford (1214), Paris (1215), Krakow (1347), Budapest (1383), Uppsala (1477), in short just

about everywhere (Naples, Padua, Cambridge, Prague, Heidelberg, Aberdeen, etc.). This was

medieval Christianity’s original contribution to culture (though the university was host to

excommunications and condemnations and, as early as the seventh century thought, science, and

research were more often pursued outside the University).

Thus was formed a polycentric cultural Europe that progressively reached the north and

center of the continent. In the Renaissance, communications, exchanges, and debates multiplied

and intensified, extending progressively beyond the theological sphere; and the development of

national languages, some of which - French, English, Spanish - had also become cultural

languages, did not curtail the flow of communication. French became the language of ideas from

the eighteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth; bilingualism and the mastering of

several languages developed among the educated; translations multiplied (thus the Tractatus

Theologico-Politicus of Spinoza (1670) was translated into English and French less than ten

years after its publication).

The thinkers of the Middle Ages peregrinated from monastery to university. Duns Scotus

taught at Oxford, then at the University of Paris, and died in Cologne. The humanists of the

Renaissance led cosmopolitan lives: Erasmus lived variously in the Netherlands, France,

England, and Basle, with sojourns in Turin, Florence, Venice, and Rome. In the seventeenth

century, Descartes worked in France and in Holland, then died in Sweden. The eighteenth

century witnessed the formation of a quasi-international cadre of philosophers who were assured

of addressing all humankind by addressing all European kind. Increasingly rich and diverse,

Europe offered an undivided space for philosophy, science, political science, letters, poetry,

novels, and music. The shared classical heritage was no longer restricted to the authors of
Antiquity but also included the European heritage of Cervantes, Montaigne, Shakespeare,

Molière, Galileo, Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz.

From the Renaissance on, great waves of thought formed and traveled across Europe.

First came the wave of the Humanist Renaissance, then that of the New Testament Renaissance.

Science proliferated in the fifteenth century. The Rationalism of the Enlightenment radiated

across Europe from Paris in the eighteenth century, just as Romanticism would shortly thereafter

spread from Jena and Berlin. In the course of this history, certain cities would for a time become

privileged cauldrons of culture: Florence, Madrid, Amsterdam, Paris, and Vienna. European

culture thus continued to cross and transcend individual nations, even though nationalist

tendencies started to increase. Yet, European culture did not ignore the individual nations.

National histories unfolded in the very midst of die European history of philosophy, literature,

and art; there was osmosis between them, but each had its dominating characteristics or its

spheres of excellence. Thus the Anglo-Saxon philosophical tradition has tended toward

empiricism, the French toward rationalism, the German toward idealism, but each country admits

powerful cross-currents, plural views, deviancies. Thus Russia has never left off harboring an

inner dialogic between despotism and populism, between Slavophilism and Occidentalism; the

ferment of the West has actively intervened in this dialogic even as the riches of the Slavic

contribution have marked and impregnated Western European culture, notably with the works of

Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Chekhov.

Europe therefore remained in all aspects a polycentric cultural reality. Those of us who

attended secondary school, or who had an appetite for reading, for art, or for music have received

or given ourselves, often without noticing it, an exposure to European culture. Calderon,

Shakespeare, Molière, Dante, Erasmus, Cervantes, Montaigne, Pascal, Diderot, Rousseau,

Goethe, Marx, Nietzsche, Kafka, Freud, Berdyayev, Croce, Gasset, Shelly, Büchner, Holderlin,

Rimbaud, T.S. Eliot, Dickens. Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Mozart, Beethoven, Moussorgsky, Mahler,

and Berg, among others, are at the heart of our identity.

During the Middle Ages, Christianity packed away the Judaic, Greek and Latin contents

it had absorbed, but in the eleventh century it removed them from the deep-freeze: Christian

thought took nourishment from Aristotelian ideas (via translations of Avicenna and Averroes), it

returned to the early texts and consulted Roman law (thirteenth century). Henceforth, the New

Testament, Greek, and Roman messages would ferment under the ecclesiastic cope, which

contained them and prevented any outburst.

Any return to religious sources that pitted the Bible and the New Testament against the

doctrines of the Catholic Church was denounced as heresy, excommunicated, reprehended, and

crushed in the Middle Ages. However, within Christian thought a dialogue was broached

between reason and faith. Reason does not oppose faith; it wants to be complementary; even

necessary, to faith. In this way, Saint Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) sought to show that

reason can understand and interpret the objects of Revelation and render God’s existence

understandable. Saint Albert the Great (1193-1308) asserted that nature, the work of God, is

“rational (Natura est ratio). Saint Thomas Aquinas (1228-1274) would work out a synthesis

between faith and reason. Conversely Duns Scotus (1265-1308) would insist on the limits of

reason, which keep it from apprehending the Divine Providence and the Trinity on its own.

Correlatively, the dispute over universals, constantly rekindled from the eleventh to the thirteenth

century, concerned the possibilities and limits of the instruments of rational thought, notably

classes and general concepts, for grasping reality. A self-critical rationality came into being with
nominalism, notably that of William of Occam (1300-1344), which granted reality only to

individual entities.

The Renaissance would draw out into the open what had previously been virtual conflicts

between Christian, Judaic, Greek and Roman cultural contributions. A first, dissociation would

arise strikingly between the message of the Gospel, itself umbilically linked to the Old

Testament, and Catholic dogma. A return to the sacred texts revitalized the messages of Paul and

Jesus on the primacy of faith, awakened the majesty of the God of Abraham, and cast doubt on

the Catholic deification of the Virgin. Medieval Catholicism had been able to inhibit and crush as

heresy any return to evangelical roots. But the reactivation or New Testament and Judaic sources

became irresistible in the fifteenth century, and, abetted by papal exactions, the Reformation

broke out in Germany (1517), propagating in waves under a variety of forms throughout Europe.

This precipitated the Wars of Religion, in turn provoking religious wars between Europe’s states

until a modus vivendi was much later reached - undermined in France by the Revocation of the

Edict of Nantes (1685).

The Reformation, itself having become plural, introduced religious pluralism into

Western Christianity. Thus did conflicts and rivalries take hold between variants of the same

faith, definitively shattering the religious unity that marked the Christianity of the crusades and

the cathedrals. Any dialogue between the Churches, which were now closed to each other,

passed underground. The Reformation had a retroactive effect on the Roman Catholic Church,

where a reformation occurred in the very midst of the Counter-reformation, and where faith to

some extent took the ascendant over works. The real dialogic, though, would arise not within

faith, but between faith and reason, belief and doubt, and finally between the new forms of

philosophical and scientific thought. It is from the fifteenth century on, conjointly with the
flowering of the Reformation, that Christian authority and Greek authority would begin to

conflict and that the dialogue of reason and faith would become dialogical.

Just as modern Europe was born politically through ruptures and conflicts; it was born

culturally through the outbreak of controversy between the Judaic, Christian, Greek and Latin

authorities. The Renaissance, which emerged in the towns or principalities of Italy and the

Netherlands before gaining all of Europe, was to open a dialogical process that would henceforth

continue uninterruptedly; and which comprised mutual borrowings and incorporations, without

bringing any end to the opposition of Greek, Roman, Judaic, and Christian cultural components.

Europe’s originality thus resides not only in its active complementarity; but also in the

permanent conflict between its Hellenic heritage, its Roman heritage, and Judeo-Christian

heritage. Starting with the Renaissance, the cultural dialogic would diversify and intensify in

numerous different but interacting dialogics between faith, reason, doubt, and empiricism.

Within and through the Renaissance, therefore, European culture emerged as a permanent

dialogic hotbed, inciting an uninterrupted outpouring of ideas, theories, aspirations, dreams, and

forms that would intermingle as in a whirlwind. This cultural whirlwind arose from the very

conditions that gave rise simultaneously to the political, social, and economic whirlwind that

both carried off and made Europe. The cultural whirlwind is distinct from the historical

whirlwind, though always interacting with it. And like the historical whirlwind, but without

necessarily coinciding with it, its center moved constantly, flitting from Florence to Amsterdam,

London, Paris, Jena, Berlin, Vienna. It was this whirlwind that swept Europe along culturally and

shaped it. Just as the political, social, and economic history of Europe accelerated, and by this

very acceleration produced what is original about Europe in contrast to other cultures, so the

cultural history of Europe accelerated its transformation, until that transformation itself became
the foundation, the key, the mystery, the fragility, the virtue, and perhaps the vice of Europe’s

culture.

Of Humanity Reconciled, and Happiness on Earth

Humanism is an original and typical creation of European culture, whose ambiguities and

complexities it reflects. Its foundation, which is man, is totally secular, but man became its

foundation because of the mythic and religious substance poured into the concept of man, giving

Humanism its radiant power and making it secrete its own myths, its primary religion (Progress),

and its secondary religion (Salvation on Earth).

Humanism is also typically European because it has constantly been racked by the

internal contradiction between its manifest principle, which is rational and secular, hence critical

of myths and religions, and its occult principle, which is mythological and religious. This

contradiction would grow stronger and stronger as developments in science reduced the

importance and place of man in the universe and as determinism and scientific objectivity,

denying all freedom and all human agency, would undermine the foundations of Humanism.

Humanism would have to play a game of hide and seek with science, considering it both as a

truth about the world and as a tool of man’s scientific progress would bring about the higher

sphere in which man as agent would master the world. When the theory of natural evolution was

formulated, Humanism understood it not as representing the natural destiny of man and his

kinship to the monkey, but rather his emancipation from nature and his superior place as Homo

Sapiens and Homo Faber, the pinnacle and endpoint of the evolution of the world.

Humanism has also been racked by the contradiction between its universal principle,

valid for all men, and its de facto Eurocentrism. It could escape this contradiction as long as it

regarded the European as a full-fledged adult human, in contrast to the incomplete human of
backward and primitive civilizations. Humanism could thus justify its colonial domination and

regard the destruction of millennial cultures on every continent as the healthy eradication of

errors, prejudices, and superstitions necessary to the introduction of true civilization.

European Humanism reached its pinnacle at the end of the last century. Imperialist

Europe imposed its domination on the world, but cultural Europe believed it was bringing the

world civilization and progress. This was the moment when the progress of civilization and the

progress or science seemed unfailingly linked, where the triumph of reason and law were,

inscribed in the meaning of History. The pinnacle was shortly followed by crisis, eliciting soul

searching that further deepened the crisis. From the very heart of European culture it now

became possible to perceive how blinding Eurocentrism was. Some Europeans would discover

that their humanism had concealed and justified an appalling inhumanity. They would discover

that their culture, which had seemed to be Culture, was in fact a culture that had generated

contempt for other cultures and justified their extermination.

The ideas originating from humanism maintain their influence today in large parts of the

world. But in Europe, at least, during the twentieth century, the progress of reason, the progress

of science, and the progress of history entered into crisis, and this crisis would shake the

foundations of Humanism.

Today we are starting to consider the adventure of European reason in all its ambivalence

and complexity and to conceive the heterogeneous and sometimes contradictory multiplicity of

interpretations contained in the word “reason”. Thus we understand that rationality stands in

contrast to rationalization, although they both have the same root. We have seen myth and

religion insert themselves parasitically in reason and in the end sometimes take hold of it, just as

reason believed that it was finally crushing them. We can therefore recognize that reason is not
only the source of critical thought, but also a source of mythological thought. Unless one makes

these distinctions and contrasts, one is forced to indict everything that bears the name of reason

or else continue to sanctify the word at every instance.

Thankfully, critical reason has never been submerged by the self-mythology of reason,

open reason has always been able to secrete the antidotes to rationalization, and emancipating

hope, which is at the Greek and humanist sources of reason, has refused to be stifled by

instrumental reason. Since the Greek Sophists, and, later, since Occam and Montaigne, reason

has used its critical aptitude for self-examination and self-criticism to recognize the relativity and

the limits of its power. Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) establishes a key date

in European culture, because it marks the point when reason turned frontally on itself as a

primary object of knowledge. Kant gave human reason full power to organize sense experience

in the knowledge of phenomena, and he removed from it all power to know what lay beneath or

beyond phenomena, that is, reality itself. By definitively linking the problem of the possibility of

knowledge with the problem of its limits, Kant simultaneously brought out the all-powerful and

all-helpless quality of human reason.

Reason was never fully triumphant in the history of European culture. It has always had

to confront experience, or the existence of faith. Thus, rationalism never reigned over the

sciences; what does reign is an often antagonistic dialogue between rationalism and empiricism.

Rationalism has never been able to give man a raison d’être or give that which exists a reason for

existing. On the contrary, it has provoked a reaction in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the

existentialism of philosophers from Kierkegaard to Max Scheller and Heidegger. Finally, after

having wanted to rid the world of its infamy, reason had to accept faith, just as faith had had to
accept the autonomy of reason. Faith even became one of reason’s key partners, incorporating

much critical rationality in order to contest what was contesting it.

The European Cultural Identity

Since the Renaissance, European culture has been a tumultuous and disorganized building site

which answers to no preconceived plan or program. Today still, science itself does not develop

in conformity to an ordered program, but according to an inventive disorder made up of many

rival or opposing research programs, intersecting with random initiatives and interactions. The

bouillon [broth] of European culture has been and remains a brouillon [a mess].

The originality of European culture lies not only in its having been the offspring of

Judeo-Christianity, the heir to Greek thought, the creator of modern science and reason, but in

having ceaselessly been the producer and the product of a whirlwind made from the interaction

and intersection between numerous dialogics that have joined and opposed: religion and reason;

faith and doubt, mythical thought and critical thought; empiricism and rationalism; existence and

idea; the particular and the universal; problematics and radical reform; philosophy and science;

humanist culture and scientific culture; the old and the new; tradition and evolution; reaction and

revolution; the individual and the collectivity; immanence and transcendence; Hamletism and

Prometheanism; Quixotism and Sancho-Panzaism, etc.

The dialogical process admittedly occurs in all cultures, but in most cultures the dialogic

is more or less hedged around with dogmas and prohibitions, and the process can be more or less

slowed, arrested, or controlled. What is particular to European culture is mainly the continuity

and intensity of its dialogical process, in which none of the constitutive authorities crush or

exterminate the others nor even exert a massive hegemony for any length of time. This is what

has made Europe a bubbling broth of cultures uninterruptedly from the fifteenth to the twentieth
century. Conflict exists even within a single term of the dialogic. Thus, reason harbors internal

opposition between its critical tendency and its systematic tendency, between open rationality

and closed rationalization, and it must remain unremittingly self-critical if it is not to risk self-

destruction. Likewise, European humanism suffers and generates a deep opposition between the

belief in its universality, which conceals a dominating Eurocentric, and its truly universalizing

potential, open to all individuals and all cultures, which unmasks and criticizes Eurocentrism.

The process allows for mutual contamination between the opposing partners: a great deal of

critical rationality has thus entered into faith, certainly to work against reason itself, but also

against the reasons of faith; and much faith has entered into reason and science. The process also

harbors astonishing reversals, as for example when excessive doubt creates anxiety; which in

turn leads back to faith; or when excessive rationalism creates a desiccation that brings on

Romanticism; or when the anti-myth itself becomes a myth, as with reason and science. The

process also contains crucial dialogical moments, in the exemplary oppositions of Pascal and

Montaigne, Hobbes and Locke, Newton and Descartes, Rousseau and Voltaire, the

Enlightenment and Romanticism, and Hegel and Kierkegaard. And finally the process admits

crises for each of the terms of the dialectic, but none ever succumb, instead profiting from the

crisis to become re-energized and renewed. So it has been and so is it still with faith. European

culture not only suffers these conflicts, oppositions, and crises but draws life from them. They

are as much what produces European culture as the products of it.

What is important in European culture are not only the main ideas (Christianity,

Humanism, Reason, Science), but the ideas together with their opposites. The genius of Europe

resides not simply in plurality and change but in the dialogue between pluralities, which

produces change. It is not in the creation of the new as such, but in the opposition of the old and
the new (the new for the sake of the new declines into fashion, superficiality, snobbism, and

conformity). In other words, what is significant in the ongoing life of European culture is the

fecundating encounter between diverse, irreconcilable, rival, and complementary elements, that

is, their dialogic. The dialogic is both the product and productive of the loop in the whirlwind

whereby each element is at once the cause and the effect of the entire loop, which evolves in a

nebulous spiral. The dialogic is at the heart of European cultural identity, and not one or

another of its elements or moments.

European culture is not solely a culture whose most significant products - Humanism,

reason, and science - are secular. It is more particularly a secular society in the sense that no idea

has stayed sufficiently sacred or accursed to escape the whirlwind of debate, discussion, and

polemics. The power of the cultural dialogic has dragged into discussion and debate those

religions anti political ideas that announced themselves as most Indisputable and Incontestable,

and though they remained sacred to the faithful, they entered into the secular arena of debate.

This ipso facto introduced pariah ideas into the discourse, ideas that had remained Untouchable

as long as Irrecusable ideas held sway. Thus, the sacred could be publicly discussed and

criticized by the profane, without being invaded or devastated by profanation.

Although written into the logic of the Renaissance from the start, secularization was a

late development, one that has remained incomplete in certain countries and that has had to

regress in this century because a sacredness of a new order was imposed on half of Europe, But

in no other culture, including the Athenian, has secularization been so extensive. Not everything,

however, was desecrated and made prosaic in the secular sphere. Quite otherwise, we have seen

that myth and religion filtered into the very heart of anti-mythic and anti-religious ideas. But the

myths of reason and the humanist religion arc neo-myths and neo-religions, which, excepting the
case of a Marxist-Leninist party in power, do not have at their disposal the established power of a

Church or State. As myths and religions they must wear camouflage, and, where they have

become parasitic, critical rationality parasitizes the parasites.

Thus, we should grant a special place at the heart of European culture to critical

rationality; which is itself question-raising, concerned about objectivity, and apt at self-criticism

and the criticism of its critics. This very rationality is the main vector of the principle of unity

that nourished and was nourished by European culture. It is true that the God of Abraham was

the God of the Universe, and it is also true that the Christian message was addressed to all men;

but for centuries and centuries only the faithful benefited from Christ’s charity. It is true that

Greek democracy recognized the dignity of man as citizen; but Greece excluded the slave and

the barbarian. It is true that the Germans and the Franks were free men; but they never conceived

of freedom for others than themselves.

It was critical rationality that pushed European humanism - threatened then as now by

Eurocentrism - to concretize its universality by recognizing the full humanity of every man,

independently of his race, continent, or culture. However, the love of humankind comes not from

rationality but from the quasi-religious mysticism behind Humanism. European universalism

consists not only of rationality, objectivity, and scientism, but also of faith and fervor, and in that

sense is the heir to Christianity. The universal is a powerful entity in all thought and all culture.

But no other culture had put the universal as the driving force of its particular culture. And it is

precisely because the universal worked against individual selfishness and egocentrism of the

nation or the culture that it was always circumvented, diverted, and betrayed in the very

European culture that conceived it.

 In the midst of the dialogical whirlwind, ideas constantly negate one another: a whirlwind

of negativity bears modern European culture aloft. Born of the negation of medieval truths,

modern European culture continually applies negation to every idea, every system, and every

theory Tile Faustian desire for absolute knowledge makes the “ever-denying spirit” appear:

Mephistopheles. But negativity is diabolic only toward what it negates. It is also, as Hegel said

of the skepticism of the sophists, the spirit’s energy, and it is it precisely what has animated the

whirlwind.

Negativity could take the aspect of doubt, irony, contestation, and revolt. European doubt

is all the more energizing in that it allies skepticism to something that in turn denies skepticism.

Thus, doubt is not only right at the core of Montaigne’s meditations, it is at the core of

Descartes’s method, of Pascal’s faith, and of Hume’s empiricism. In considering the real heroes

of European literature, who arc all anti-hero heroes, great by virtue of their very weakness, can

we not say that doubt is at the heart of Hamlet’s sacred duty, of Oblomov’s impervious

sluggishness, of Ivan Karamazov’s tragedy, and of Stavrogin’s distress?

Today, Milan Kundera can retrospectively recognize Don Quixote, Faust, and Don Juan

as typically European heroes because they are heroes of failure and derision in the pursuit of the

sublime and the absolute (Kundera 1988). Each in his own fashion refused to accept finitude,

believed in boundlessness, and ignored the reality principle just when reality came to confront

him. And this at the very time when the capitalist, bourgeois, and scientific world was achieving

the most phenomenal successes by obeying every realist principle. But we know today that

capitalism, science, and Europe itself were obeying deep urges to deny finitude, believe in

boundlessness, and forget the reality principle. European literature has always carried within it
the invisible negative made up of suffering and failure, of the euphoric image of Infinite progress

and world conquest.

Was there not finally some secret and permanent connection between the negativity

inherent to European culture and the ultimately self-destructive process that dragged Europe to

its ruin? There is no ready answer. Here also the problematics must be examined.

The inclination to problematics is the hallmark of European culture. Let us not forget that

the Renaissance gave rise to generalized problematizing: questions were raised about God, the

cosmos, nature, and man. Later there were instances when European culture believed that one

thought, one principle, one fact had finally brought it absolute certainty. Humanism believed that

man, the measure of all things, could be the foundation of all things. Reason believed that it had

founded the truth of its discourse in logic, Science that it had founded the certainty of its theories

in the certainty of its experiments. But these principles, thoughts, facts, and foundations were put

in question each time within a generation, and problematics each time resumed its hold of

European culture. From this perspective, the ongoing evolution of European culture was nothing

more than the effect of ongoing problematizing, which led to the widespread and radical

problematizing of today. Europe plunged all things - men, life, the cosmos - into a process of

change and evolution, problematizing everything. For a long time, it seemed that change, history,

and progress were immune to problematics because they themselves raised the problems. They

have now entered the realm of questioning, and have even been swallowed up by it. They are

problematic and will always be so. As Jan Patocka has said: “The problem of history cannot be

resolved. It must remain” (1982).

 A generalized problematics took root in Europe. From now on “Europe can only take root

in problematics, because such is its inheritance” (Chenavier 1987: 12-19). We are the heirs of

problematics; we must now become its shepherds.

Europe and Global Challenges

We live henceforth in the planetary era. Since the discovery of America, the world has become

increasingly connected at all points. The uninterrupted inter(retro)actions between three or four

billion human beings constitute a common fabric and a de facto solidarity. Any event at any point

on the planet, not only in Moscow, Peking, or Washington, but also in Iran, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon,

Brazil, Mexico, Nicaragua, or Chile has almost immediate repercussions for the rest of the world.

The AIDS virus, traveling at jet speed, is spreading meteorically across the globe.

Humanity, while maintaining its extraordinary diversity of cultures, has united under the aegis of

a technology that enables and assures all imaginable intercommunication. Humanity constitutes

one geo-ecological entity, within one biosphere, on which it relies and which in turn relies on

human actions. Humanity recognized its planetary habitat in the blue orange, lost in a black sky

transmitted via televised image from the moon. Humanity has learned that the human species,

despite the diversity of its races, ethnic groups, and its individuals, is genetically and

intellectually one. Everything is therefore converging so that Humanity can become aware of its

common destiny, to which all other common destinies, including the European community are

subordinately linked. We are part of the planet and the planet is part of us, just as the whole of a

hologram is inscribed in each of its points. Thus, the coffee beans I drink each morning come

from the high plateau of Central America or Abyssinia; the tea brewing in my cup was picked in

faraway Yunnan, my fruit juice was pressed from Floridian or Israeli grapefruits. My shirts of

Indian cotton were manufactured in Taiwan or Macao. I blow my nose into handkerchiefs of
Egyptian thread or Kleenex tissue from the Canadian forests. I listen to the news on my Japanese

transistor radio, write the rough draft of this European book with a fountain pen nib of Siberian

or South-African gold, type it on my Japanese Canon while awaiting delivery or my American

Macintosh. At meals, my glass is reserved for France, but South America, Asia, and America are

invited onto my plate. Already the fabric of our lives contains a large, share of planetary texture.

We are unquestionably in the planetary era, since the planet is in us.

Europe has shrunk. It is now no more than a fragment of the West, where four centuries

ago the West itself was a fragment of Europe. It is no longer at the center of the world but

pushed back to the margins of History. Europe has become provincial in relation to the gigantic

empires now extant, and it has become a province, not only within the Western world but also

within the planetary era. And yet, Europe can only assume its provinciality if it stops being

parceled up and split into states, each of which enjoys absolute sovereignty. It is the fact of

Europe’s provincial nature, paradoxically that makes it necessary for Europe to overstep its

constituent nations to preserve them and declare itself a Law above the level of the states.

Thus, the new situation requires much more than bare acceptance and adaptation; it

forces two conversions that, while apparently contradictory, are in fact complementary: one that

has us go beyond the Nation, and the other that reduces us to a Province. It is necessary to join

together the act of regenerating into Province-Europe and the act of assuming the destiny of the

planet, that is, to reassume the Universal in a new and concrete fashion, a concept developed by

our own culture. Europe must metamorphose at once into a province and a meta-nation.

European identity, just like any other identity, can only be a component within a set of

identities. We live in the illusion that identity is one and indivisible, whereas it is always an

unitas multiplex. We are all individuals with multiple identities, in the sense that we bring
together a family identity, a local identity a regional identity, a national identity, a transnational

identity (Slavic, Germanic, Latin), and possibly a religious or doctrinal identity. A conflict

between identities has often ended in tragedy as in the first half of the twentieth century when a

child had a German father and a French mother. But there can also be happiness in reconciling

the blessings of two conflicting identities - as I was forced to do myself with my numerous

“motherlands" and as the young of Algerian-French descent will do once they have transformed

what is for them a contradiction into complexity.

Actually, there is no more possible conflict between the national identity of a European

and his European identity. The problem is that awareness of this European identity is still

underdeveloped, as we have pointed out, in relation to the real developments of the community

of shared destiny. One has to be severed from Europe to feel ones European identity acutely as

were the Czech intellectual refugees in New York in the wake of 1968 who, when leaving, on

vacation, some to France and others to Italy, said: “We are going home.” We are not all emigrés,

fortunately, and we must decomparimentalize Europe from the inside and open Europe up to

itself. We need an immediate instrument of linguistic communication in the new province. It

would be easy as the example of Switzerland shows, for every European to speak two European

languages besides his own. Europe runs no risk to its culture from having English become the

common language. Did it not become the lingua franca for the various cultures and ethnic groups

of India without corrupting them or devaluating the regional languages, or imposing an English

identity on the Indian? The use of English in addition to a knowledge of two other European

languages, would also have the advantage of facilitating communications with the rest of the

planet.
 European identity has no choice but to integrate with a fully human identity the

consciousness of which is favored by our planetary era, but is opposed by regressions, ruptures,

and conflicts appropriate to the Iron Age. The European identity and the planetary identity arc

both underdeveloped, but they in no way contradict each other; there are rather strictly linked in

the insight that binds the idea of the Meta-nation to the idea of Province Europe.

While a marginal province - indeed, because a marginal province - Europe can have a

central awareness of planetary problems. Europe is certainly not the only place where a planetary

awareness exists or an acute awareness of the crises of technology, science, and the

industrialized society. But it is the only place where there is a sufficiently general awareness of

false solutions and false messiahs. It is the only place where, in the past forty years, government

paranoia and the religion of the Nation have slumbered, where the hearth of imperialism has

gone out, where the myth of earthly salvation has exposed its lie even to its most fervent believers.

Europe may then take on the vocation of becoming a Foundation, in the sense given this

term by Isaac Asimov in his science fiction epic of the same name: at a time when galactic

civilization was at its pinnacle, a few sages foresaw its inevitable decline and its return to

barbarism and chaos; they decided to gather on a remote planet all the knowledge needed for

civilization to flourish again in the coming millennia, a planet known as the Foundation (Asimov

1951). The idea of the Foundation brings together the conservation and preservation of cultural

and civilization goods from the past (not European goods alone) and the preparation for future

transformations.

The past has to be saved in order to preserve the future. But we must also sow the seeds

for a future that will pull humanity out of the planetary Iron Age. Europe’s stake in this matches

that of the planet. Europe has two “foundational” vocations, one cultural, the other political. We
must imagine a “second Renaissance" in Europe that would link these two dimensions. The first

dimension, starting from the experience of nihilism and generalized problematics, should open

the European dialogic to outside cultural contributions and dedicate the second Renaissance to

civilizing barbarian ideas by opening them to complexity, to thinking the hidden principles that

govern human thought invisibly and to attempting, in short, to graduate the human spirit from its

prehistory. The second dimension, starting from the consciousness of the planetary Iron Age,

should assign Europe the mission, at once altruistic and selfish, of protecting, regenerating,

refreshing, developing, and reincarnating democracy.

We must take root again in Europe in order to open ourselves up to the world just as we

must open to the world in order to take root in Europe. Opening up to the world is not the same

as adapting to the world. It is also adapting the contributions of the world to one’s own uses. One

must assimilate anew in order to experience a new expansion. If the Renaissance was an opening

up of Europe during which the assimilation of ideas, far from proving corrosive, enabled Europe

to construct its unique and original character, then why not envisage a second Renaissance? If

the Renaissance was the demolition and reconstruction of thought, why not envisage, taking

nihilism and the loss of foundations as a point of departure, the re-beginning of thought? The

Europe we should opt for is the Europe that was able to elaborate meta-European viewpoints.

This is this Europe that would be able to integrate non-European viewpoints into its dialogic.

Once again openness and regeneration are linked. The Japanese have shown themselves

able to assimilate Western civilization "with a Japanese soul” (wakon-yosai). For us it is a

question of assimilating non-European thoughts "with a European soul”, that is, of introducing

them as new partners in the European cultural dialogic. An encounter with a strong foreign

civilization or culture raises the alternative: assimilate or be assimilated. The capacity for
assimilating supposes a certain cultural vitality, which supposes certain economic and social

conditions.

European culture remained somewhat open to the world it had dominated if only because

it had discovered and explored this world. Whereas one strand of European thought took strength

from comparing itself with the world, believing in the superiority of the Western white male,

another nourished its humanism and its critical thought on the knowledge of the diversity of men

and cultures. As early as Montaigne, travel and travel accounts had inoculated our beliefs and

ideas with relativity. In the sixteenth century, the apparently naive theme of the Noble Savage

helped us to conceptualize the vice and the corruption of our civilization. And as early as

Montesquieu, Europeans put themselves in the shoes of an imaginative Persian in order to

examine our culture from the outside in a quasi-ethnographic way.

Moreover, through the mythico-real notion of the Noble Savage, European culture,

undergoing rapid transition, was able to consider the problem of its growing distance from a

natural art of living. Through the mythico-real notion of the Wise Mandarin, Europe raised the

problem of a wisdom that has become impractical within a history that has turned into a

whirlwind. Then Romanticism expressed the diffuse, vast, and inexpressible needs of the soul in

the midst of a civilization dedicated to technical precision and numerical calculation. Today the

original arts of living that arose from European cultures, particularly the Mediterranean, have

tended to decline into consumerism and to disintegrate through haste, acceleration, time slotting,

and bureaucratization. If there is one problem raised and imposed by Europe’s trajectory at the

close of the scientifico-technological civilization, it is the problem of the art of living. Now that

Europe has been pushed back to the margins of history, it can envisage the problem concretely.
Europe ought not to seek the art of living in other cultures, but raise its own questions on the art

of living by questioning the cultures of the world, including archaic and dead cultures, “with a

European soul”.

Our mission is not only to stop the “culturecides” initiated by us, but also to recognize the

treasures of experience, wisdom, and subtlety in the cultures we are annihilating. What

contemporary European anthropologists have experienced among certain tribes in Amazonia,

Africa, and Oceania is not simply the strangeness of the mores and rites but also the sense of a

peaceful fabric of existence with better relations between individuals, in short, a genuine art of

living. What I felt on Machu Picchu was not solely the emotion of a tourist, but the sudden

realization that the life of a monk dedicated to the Sun God Inti had as much or as little meaning

as the life of a European deputy; or sociologist, or philosopher. In my journeys to Latin America,

Asia, and Africa, I learned that the arts of living had flourished everywhere. Here again the

European spirit’s inner quest necessitates an opening onto the outside world.

We can already observe in Europe and America the extensive spread of different forms of

yoga and zazen, which bring something to our utilitarian and consumer-oriented universe beyond

their value for relaxation or gymnastics: they are also methods for achieving inner peace.

Obviously we make use of the practical and consumable forms of these oriental practices only -

that is, degraded forms - and we are not capable of introducing to our mental universe the

philosophies or mystical beliefs that subtend these practices. We, nonetheless confusedly,

perceive that yoga and zazen invite us to meditate. And we sense that there are several forms of

meditation, from those that cultivate an inner void to those that are slow, long, and in-depth

reflections on a perception, a word, an idea, or a show of nature.

 We must learn (anew) to meditate. In Europe, meditation had been reserved for the piety

of monks, in isolation from the world, and for the reflection of philosophers grappling with a

problem. Yet, it could well become an antidote to one of the main poisons of our civilization,

which exteriorizes, dismantles, divides, and accelerates everything it touches. Meditation could

possibly become more than an antidote: a necessary means to return inside ourselves and inside

our real problems, a means of acceding to the contemplation of the amazing world that science

reveals to us, a means of communicating with the mystery of what we call the Real.

Furthermore, we may well ask ourselves, as S.C. Kolm (1982) suggests, whether the

Gautama Buddha’s message does not also concern our European civilization. I say “message”

and not “religion”, although Buddhism in its pure form is a religion without religion. Here again

I do not claim that we should integrate the message as it stands: we cannot wish to annihilate

within our lifetime a “me” that is at the heart of our individualist culture, and we cannot wish to

escape reincarnations we do not believe in. But what we can draw from Prince Gautama’s

message is the invitation not to turn away from nothingness and suffering. Although the

salvation religions have terrified us overly with its threat, we are indeed today called on to

confront a terrifying nothingness. As Europeans, we must confront it because we have been

driven to the doors of Nihilism by our philosophy and to the threshold of destruction by our

science.

The demise of a promised earthly happiness confronts us with the intensification of

human suffering. The latter does not just come from hunger, poverty, slavery and war. The

abolition of these scourges would eliminate immense suffering but would not resolve the

problem of despair. Where we now have affluence and prosperity new forms of suffering have

cropped up: loneliness, torment, misunderstanding, anxiety, distress, and grief.

 The Buddha’s message tells us that pain is the problem above all other problems and asks

us to consider it with infinite respect and emotion. This means that pain does not just pertain to

anaesthetists, Sisters of Theresa, psychoanalysts, tranquilizers, or prescriptions reimbursable by

social security but calls instead for a cultural and civilizational reform that will deepen and

revolutionize the meaning of what Christianity called charity and what Humanism termed

humanitarianism.

Bastardizations and syncretism are no doubt to be feared when cultures mix and decline.

But we must also remember that there is no pure culture, and that they are all of them, starting

with our own, of mixed blood. Turning to Buddhism should not be understood as a substitute for

Christian salvation or psychotropic drugs, designed to rid contemporary life of anxiety and

torment. I would say that on the contrary, our European culture - dialogical as it is - could not

and must not escape contradiction and conflict. It bears anxiety and torment within it not only as

gnawing ills but also as virtues of conscience and elucidation. European culture could not

renounce them without debasing itself. But it could also not avoid questioning the message of

peace and deliverance. European culture can summon them and absorb them in her dialogical

process.

The first Renaissance was open to all the horizons of its world. The second Renaissance

cannot help but be open to all horizons of the World.

Conclusion: A New Crisis of European Civilization?

Europe fully participated in globalization on its ambivalent journey in this process. It reacted

within the process and tried to adapt to globalization in a number of different European countries

in a number of ways, notably through privatization of businesses. Aware that it could totally

dismantle some of her social conquests, Europe tried to avoid phenomena caused by economic
liberalism. If one can claim that the global era began in Europe with enslavements and

colonizations, the most lethal of remedies, which inflicted disastrous effects on the dominated

countries, stemmed from European ideas. To understand these remedies, one should start with

Bartolomeo de las Casas, the priest who persuaded the Spanish episcopate that the Indians were

vested with a soul enjoying full humanity. One can begin with Montaigne, who believed that

each civilization had its merits and virtues and for whom there was no monopoly from Europe.

One can begin with Montesquieu who looked at France with a Persian gaze. One must begin

with the Rights of Men, one must begin with democratic ideas. All of these ideas transform into

global ideas when they are grasped by emancipating people. Born in Europe, the idea of modern

state was appropriated by the people who were dominated or colonized for the best

(emancipated) or the worst. Even today one perceives that the women’s rights problem is a world

problem but whose epicenter is Europe. One notes that many solidarity movements directed

toward countries oppressed by globalization stem from Europe.

Europe is therefore both the poison and the antidote. It is the problem of the

“Pharmacon”, a word that indicates both the former and the latter. Thus what produces evil also

produces the remedy to evil. Anti-globalization is very much discussed although it in fact relates

to the second globalization emanating from the aforementioned European emancipation ideas

involving awareness that the world is not merchandise. The European rote in this movement is

undoubtedly present and incarnated by the Roquefort cheese producer José Bové’s symbolic

role. Attac is another illustration of the movement, originally a French idea that subsequently

globalized. As far as I am concerned, I believe that we are in a gestation epoch for the second

globalization and we obviously do not yet know who will prevail. I believe Europe to be very

present in this movement but she is not alone.

 Originally, Europe’s intentions (EU) were political. A small, political elite of Christian-

democrats and Socialists embodied the European project. The obstacles obstructing this political

idea were great, but the economy benefited from the favorable economic boom of the 1950s and

practically set up the constitution of the European economic unity. This is manifested today by

the Euro. But the political institutions have remained dwarves. Europe was a political dwarf as

well and likewise a military dwarf. And yet, it is obvious that it is to exist politically.

Indifferently of a federal or a confederate system, what matters is to invent, not to imitate. I am

personally not a partisan of a single European state. I am a partisan of supranational instances

having executive power on fundamental problems: military, political, ecological, economic and

others. National states should remain. I think one has opposed native countries to a Supranational

Europe through a schematic vision of Europe. There must be a Europe of native lands in a

supranational Europe. Patriotic entities as such are not condemned, but absolute national

sovereignty ought to be transcended when vital and fundamental problems of a collective and

global nature are involved. This is what ought to be brought about by a new organization.

I regret the abandonment of the word Community, but we now have to institutionalize

this Union through what is called a charter. I think one should multiply the symbols. The Euro in

fact is just as much a political and psychological symbol as it is a currency. Just as the European

passport constantly confirms a European identity, the Euro contributes to this identity. Like, any

other identity, Europe must develop it from membership symbols. Logic, even economics, must

lead to harmonized taxing systems, social protection, etc. For now, the problem is that Europe

has great challenges to face and difficulties to surmount. It has already overcome some in the

past, but we now find ourselves confronting several very serious and important crises: an
evolutionary crisis of institutions related to the admission of new countries into the European

Union. A crisis related to the disappearance of a whole generation of great Europeans from the

public scene, spirits who had distinguished themselves during WWII and who held the European

ideal in their souls. We experience today a pragmatic era, of day-to-day politics. Political life has

undergone an amazing shrinking process. You have a crisis of the European spirit and a crisis of

European mythology concomitant with the crisis of political thought. Politicians themselves live

narrowly; for them politics are in tow to economics. They do not seem to be aware of the fact

that the great cultural and intellectual problems can be a hindrance for the Second Renaissance of

Europe.

I am totally unsure about the future. The reason why I am not optimistic. I would rather

be voluntarist. I am afraid Europe will actually stall, even dissolve, because my assumption is that,

what does not regenerate degenerates. If Europe does not regenerate, she will degenerate. The

possibility of virulent neo-nationalisms is one of the existing degeneration factors. To what

extent these neo-nationalists’ manifestations eventually prevail, in different European countries,

remains unknown. As you all know, the most rational and reasonable of predictions never

expected that the insignificantly small and hysterical Hitlerian party (having never obtained more

than 10 percent popularity) would be pushed to power in 1929. The crushing economic crisis as

well as the renewed surge of national frustration provoked by the defeat of WWI made it

somehow possible. Reasonable predictions today exclude the return of past fascism to power, but

forms of neo- dictatorships, neo-fascisms, post-fascisms, etc. cannot be excluded. One cannot

exclude an intermediary neo-authoritarian system in Russia which, thanks to a pluralistic party

government, cannot be totalitarian any more. However, with very complex political networks

initiated under Putin with the help or the press with freedom, etc. everything is possible. The
future is in no way determined, no one possesses the future, the world is in a state of chaos,

crisis. Were Europe to be earned out, not only would it be a great opportunity for Europe, but

perhaps also for the whole world.

The greatest of all mistakes is to believe that everything that exists today is eternal. We

have a historical example: the practice of torture had disappeared from all European countries in

the nineteenth century. However, in the twentieth century, torture returned to Nazi Germany; as

well as in Russia, and the French practiced it during the Algerian War. What was thought to be

abolished, that is torture, had reappeared. Nothing is politically irreversible. There is nothing

established, and I would even declare that a democracy must constantly regenerate itself. Having

democratic institutions is not enough. In Switzerland there is a marvelous local democracy. One

can vote in the public square. But if the citizens do not move to the public square, what is left of

democracy? Democracy is an institution powered by a democratic vitality.

One can argue that it will be very arduous to impose democracy on a European scale.

Why? It has already proved extremely difficult, and took centuries, to install democracy on the

scale of the national states. Originally, democracy was a City phenomenon. It appeared in

ancient Greece, reappeared in Tuscany in the Middle Ages, and finally in the small towns of the

Netherlands. A very long historical process was necessary for England to attain national

democracy. A long historical process was also necessary for France. In short, a general historical

European process proved necessary. Today, there would be extremely thorny problems building

a European democracy. Trans-European political parties would have to be established,

syndicates, cooperatives and trans-European employers should be organized. A public-spirited

European mentality must come into existence. One should be able to install a European

“Présidence de la République” accepted try a majority of Europeans. Thus, it is a long process

towards unity within diversity; we are involved in. a long haul whose goal is to save what exists

of democracy.

I stand for the extension of the European Union. The political problem is the true

problem. The problems raised by the integration of new nations in the EU would be the questions

of executive power and the right to veto. This entails that the extension of the EU, meaning the

increased membership of the EU, must be expressed through a modification of executive powers.

That is to say through a simple majority in some cases, two-thirds in others and vetoes in

extreme cases.

This is where we sense the need for a charter, which is moreover necessary to reaffirm

the first and fundamental intentions of the European fathers. Europe was born to put an end to

wars and fratricides and it was born with a requirement of democracy, as demonstrated by how

far back it goes. Europe can only live democratically, and I trust that in the meantime the need

for a European tribunal imposes itself to breach the gap until the international tribunal becomes

operational. It is quite obvious that if Europe is to be democratic, each offense against

democracy and each attempt to establish a dictatorship falls under the jurisdiction of a European

tribunal.

Finally, the European Renaissance can only be carried out with the help or a deep reform

or thought, of ways of thought. These should from now on enable nations to confront the

complexities of world problems, in order to return to fundamental problems, and to rediscover

the sense or the global problems. A tremendous effort is necessary, bearing in mind that the

future is undecided.
Notes
1. Reprinted from Mozaffari, M. Globalization and Civilizations., 125-150., Copyright

(2002), with permission from Routledge UK.

2. In contrast to Henri Pirenne, Lombard believes that the influence of Islamic civilization

has a fecundating effect on barbarian Europe. These two contradictory theses could be

successively true.

3. On the idea of Europe in history, see Duroselle (1965), Voyenne (1964), Rougemont

(1961).

References
Asimov, Isaac. (1953). Foundation. New York: Gnome Press.

Chenavier, Robert. (1987). Sortir du XXe siècle. Lettre international, 12, 12-19.

Delmas, Claude. (1980). La civilisation Européenne. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,

series Que sais-je?

Duroselle, Jean-Baptiste. (1965). L’idée d’Europe dans l’Histoire. Paris: Denoȅl.

Kolm, Serge Christophe. (1982). Le bonheur-liberté: Bouddhisme profond el modernité. Paris:

Presses Universitaires de France.

Kundera, Milan. (1988). The Art of the Novel. (Linda Asher, Trans). New York: Grove Press.

Lombard, Maunce. (1971). L'lslam dans sa première grandeur. Paris: Flammarion.

Patocka, Jan. (1982). Essais hérétiques sur la philosophie de l’histoire. Paris: Verdier.

Pirenne, Henri. (1958). Histoire de l’Europe des invasions au XVIe siècle. Brussels: La

Renaissance du Livre.

Rougemont, Denis de. (1961). Vingt-huit siècles d’Europe: La conscience européenne à travers

les textes, d’Hésiode à nos jours. Paris: Payot.

Voyenne, Bernard. (1964). Histoire de l’idée européenne. Paris: Payot.

Chapter 31: Mediterranean Identities

The panel of judges of the International Catalonia Prize, made up of the members of the

Advisory Counil of the Catalan Institute for Mediterranean Studies, meeting at the Palau de la

Generalitat in Barcelona, agreed by absolute majority to award the VI International Catalonia

Prize to Edgar Morin for the following reasons:

First: For his incomparable work in sociology, conceived around the human being’s

anthroposocial richness, in which he brings together everything from biology to imagination,

through the scientific arguments in defence of the diversity of man within the unity of species,

arriving at an essential ecological unity through a process and method at times rigourous and

open.

Second: Because his work and his personal background, strongly impregnated with the

values of freedom and independence, have been a decisive contribution to the formation of

European awareness from the post-war period until today.

Third: For the constant attention Edgar Morin has paid to the Mediterranean and to its

communicational nature, and the interest with which he has studied twentieth century Catalònia,

which he has described as a paradigm of cultural and social integration in the European diversity.

CATALÒNIA, offers the text of the speech made by Edgar Morin when he received the

prize on 19 May 1994.

Your majesties, Mr. President, members of the jury, ladies and gentlement, I cordially say thank

you.
 Like the word love, the word thank is a term that has been trivialized, that only recovers

its full intensity when it comes from the bottom of the heart. I thank everyone who has conceded

me their vote: I thank the Catalan Institute of Mediterranean Studies to whom I owe a great

honour I hope to be worthy of; I thank the friends, known and unknown, present here; I thank

President Pujol, who has known and knows how to express and fulfill Catalonia's will to be and

who already knows the friendship and admiration I feel for him, and finally, I thank His Majesty

the King, to whom Spain owes the restoration of democracy and the recognition of her diversity,

and I am profoundly aware of the distinction his presence here today represents.

This prize awarded to me by the Generálitat de Catalunya through the Catalan Institute of

Mediterranean Studies goes to a Mediterranean, whose identity is in this way ennobled.

If my genes and my chromosomes could speak, they would tell you of a Mediterranean

odyssey starting more or less like Ulysses's, but a little farther south, in the Asian Mediterranean,

today's Middle East. They would speak to you of their travels through the Roman Empire, their

arrival in the Iberian Peninsula and Provence; they would describe roots put out over more than a

thousand years and seven-centuries in a plural Spain made up of several kingdoms and three

religions which some say lasts until 1492 and others until the seventeenth century. My genes and

my chromosomes would describe to you how my convert ancestors were for two centuries

subjected to the baptism of the Catholic Church; and then they would tell of their "re-Judaized"

stay in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, in Leghorn, until the end of the eighteenth century, when,

driven by the powerful currents of Western economic expansion, they reached the great city of

Thessaloniki, in the Ottoman Empire, peopled largely by Sephardim who spoke the ancient

Castilian from before the "j"; they would go on to describe the return to the West at the

beginning of this century until they finally settled down in France.

 My genes would tell you that all these successive Mediterranean identities are

symbiotically united in me, and that during this millenarian odyssey, the Mediterranean has

become a deeply felt motherland. My taste buds are Mediterranean and cry out for olive oil, revel

in grilled aubergines and pimentos, and crave for tapas or mezés. My ears adore flamenco and

Oriental chants. And in my soul there is something that puts me in filial resonance with its sky,

its sea, its islands, its coasts, its arid wastes and its fertility...

My genes would also reveal to you the typically Iberian experience of the "marrà".

Contrary to what many people believe, the "marrà" was not just a Jew hiding behind a Christian

mask, but someone who experienced, in a single spirit and a single soul, the reunion of two

antagonistic religions. This antagonism either produces the dissolution of the formal side that

both religions have to them and thereby triggers off a prodigious mystical combustion, as in the

case of Teresa de Avila; or it dilutes both religions and opens the way to doubt and general

questioning, as in the case of Montaigne, also a descendent of converts. Or else the transcendent

God disintegrates and it is nature that becomes divine in becoming self-creating, as in the case of

Spinoza. And in my case as well, because I am a mystic in my own way, of course, I am rational,

I am sceptical, and I would not have been so without Sepharad, that is without the Spains in their

plurality.

My genes have not spoken to me of Barcelona, but my character is marked by this city. I

was eighteen years old in January 1939, when I was shocked to hear of the fall of Barcelona. In

my book Autocritique, I wrote: "I cried as I looked at the enormous headlines of Paris Soir, and

hid my face behind the newspaper in the room where my parents listened to the accordions of

Radio Ile de France, not knowing that at the same moment my classmate Jacques Francis

Rolland and hundreds like him were leaving their childhood behind them and entering
adolescence mourning, all together and alone. The end of hope, and that all the other hopes that

were later to arise would be built on those ruins" (p.21).

I had not idealized Republican Spain, because I knew of its internal conflicts, the

devastation of Barcelona by the sporadic civil war within the larger Civil War, causing,

especially, the assassination of Andreu Nin at the hands of the Soviet secret services of General

Orlov. But I had a vague feeling that this disaster was the start of an even more terrible historic

disaster, and I sensed, like so many others, that the fall of Barcelona was the prelude to other

falls: for one, the fall of France just a few years later, and subsequently the fall of Europe ...

When I discovered Barcelona, after the war, I felt what a German writer, writing about

Barcelona, called an amorous intoxication. And I love the Barcelona of today more than ever, a

city of hope, a city of peace, an open city, rich in Catalan culture, rich in Spanish culture and in

the cultures of the Iberian immigrants who have become Catalanized here. It's a city which, at the

same time as it feeds off its past, looks forward to a future of Iberian, European and

Mediterranean partnership.

But in the same way that in 1939 I saw the fall of Barcelona as the most sinister of

warnings for Europe, in the past year I have been equally violently shocked and seen the same

ominous messages in the breakup of the multiethnic wealth of Bosnia and Herzegovina and in

the siege of Sarajevo. Wasn't Bosnia and Herzegovina itself the forerunner of the Europe we

wished for? Wasn't it at once laic and multireligious? This assassination of Bosnia and

Herzegovina is a serious blow to the idea of Europe and the possibility of Europe.

We are seeing the return of an evil we thought we had banished in creating the European

Community. It is true that the national state has fulfilled a fertile civilizing role in European
history, but it has carried within it an all-too-often realised potential for cleansing. National

cleansing was at first religious. There is Spain in 1492, then the triumph of the principle of cuius

region eius religio, the expulsion of the Catholics from England, the expulsion of the Protestants

from France following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes and everywhere a little bit the

expulsion or ghettoization of the Jews.

In the twentieth century, cleansing has become racial and ethnic. The wars between

Greece and Turkey led to the mass displacement of Greeks from Asia Minor to Macedonia, of

Turks from Macedonia to Turkey, and a few years later Hitler wanted to cleanse Germany of

Jews, gypsies and the mentally ill. The end of the war meant the expulsion of the Germans from

Silesia and the Sudetenland and of the Poles from Ukraine.

Today, in former Yugoslavia, in Europe, in the Mediterranean, conflicts everywhere take

on an atrocious aspect of ethnic and religious segregation. The only cure for closed concepts of

race and nation is the partnership principle. The fate of Europe lies in a choice between

partnership and barbarism. And it is not only the fate of Europe; it is that of the Mediterranean.

The Mediterranean! A notion too evident not to be mysterious!

A sea that carries so many diversities and so much unity!

The sea of extreme fertilities and extreme aridities!

A sea whose centre is formed by its circumference!

A sea at once of antagonism and complementarity: especially the conflictive

complementarity of moderation and immoderation!

The cradle of all cultures of progress, exchange and openness.

 The womb of the most sacred spirit and of the most profane!

The womb of polytheist religions and of monotheist religions!

The womb of the cults of mystery that promise resurrection after death and of the wisdom

that demands acceptance of the nothingness of death!

The womb of philosophy, of theosophy, of gastrosophy and of enosophy!

The womb of rationality, of laicality and of humanist culture!

The womb of the rebirth and the modernity of the European spirit!

A sea for the communication of ideas and the convergence of the knowledge. Aristotle

managed to take from Baghdad to Fez before bringing it to the Sorbonne in Paris!

A tri-continental sea of fertile encounters and of tragic breaks between East and West,

South and North.

The sea that was the World and which for we Mediterraneans lives on as our world.

Our Mediterranean has shrunk and has become a lake of the planetary age, bathing the

southern shores of a Europe reduced to the size of Switzerland beside the enormous continental

masses bordering the Pacific, the new centre of gravity of the world. This Mediterraean which

ought, then, to enjoy the peace of a lake, the sweetness of a lake, is once more becoming a place

of storms. This marginated Mediterranean is once more one of the planet's most important

seismic zones.

A Warning
I make this warning because Europe tends to leave the Mediterranean to one side at the very

moment when the problems and dangers are on the increase. The processes of dislocation,
degradation and isolation that are taking place on a world scale particularly affect the

Mediterranean. What is more, the sea of communication becomes the sea of segregation; the sea

of crossbreeding becomes the sea of religious, ethnic and national cleansing. The great

cosmopolitan cities, true "world cities", the melting-pots of Mediterranean culture, have one by

one faded into monochromy: Thessaloniki, Istanbul, Alexandria, Beirut. Sarajevo is in its death

throes.

After 1989, Western Europe, turning to the newly opened East, left to one side the

fundamental problems of the Mediterranean which are of such vital concern to it. The European

economy has turned to the potential markets of the East, glimpsing in the distance the

enormous Chinese market. And the Mediterranean has been gradually forgotten. The European

powers have proved impotent in the face of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in the face of the

tragedy of the former Yugoslavia, and look on in bewilderment at the tragedy of Algeria.

The countries of Southern Europe, especially the Latin Arc, have failed to draw up a

common conception for a Mediterranean policy. Open-minded Europe is drifting back into being

the Europe of rejection: just as the process of integration of Islam in Europe had begun --a

posthumous process in Spain, reintegrating its Muslim past into its identity, modern processes in

France and Germany, with the North African and Turkish immigrants-, suddenly the old

European devil reappears: refuse, exclude Islam. The Serbian offensive in Bosnia is no accident;

it is the continuation of a reconquest.

We have allowed Bosnia and Herzegovina's varied, multiethnic nature to be destroyed,

and now that the country is crippled and no more than a Muslim outpost, the fear arises of an

Islamic state. Everywhere, the necessary interlocutor is increasingly seen as a potential adversary
and this is repeated in the four corners of the Mediterranean (North-South and East-West). The

Mediterranean is fading as a common denominator.

What is more, the great seismic line starting in the Caucasus, in Armenia/Azerbaijan, and

which over the last fifty years has devastated the Middle East, has extended West towards the

Mediterranean, has ravaged Bosnia and Herzegovina and is destroying Algeria. Along this line

the antagonisms between East/West, North/South, Rich/Poor, Age/Youth, Laicality/Religion,

Islam/Christianity/Judaism are stirred up and become lethal. Today we can hope, without any

certainty, for a gradual pacification of the Middle East, especially thanks to Palestine's accession

to national independence, but the geohistoric black hole is still there and now two more have

been created in Bosnia and Algeria.

In Algeria, we are witnessing the disastrous consequences not only of the FIS vote, but

also of the negation of this vote, and everything points towards an implosion. What will happen

in Algeria? What formidable geopolitical upheaval is going to take its place? Are we heading

towards a new closure of the Mediterranean? Towards chaos?

In these tragic conditions, the worst enemies are the only ones that are helping each other;

in the same way that in Italy black terrorism and red terrorism used the same methods for

the common objective of destroying democracy, in Israel/Palestine it is the Israeli and Arab

fanatics who are the most ardent partners in sabotaging peace, and in same same way, the horrors

of assassinations and the horrors of repression are' working together to prevent any kind of

democratic entente. All over the world, rival hatreds have a common enemy: concord,

reconciliation, compassion, forgiveness.

 Can we save the Mediterranean? Can we restore, or rather, develop its

communicative function? Can we return to that sea of exchanges and encounters, that melting-

pot and brew of cultures that machine for manufacturing civilization?

There are economic solutions, but exclusively economic solutions are never enough and

sometimes create problems. The IMF obliges states to obey its demands so as to obtain credits,

but also to disobey them so as to avoid political and social confrontations. Development is

essential, but so is a thorough reconsideration and transformation of our concept of

development, which is underdeveloped. So it is not just a question of implanting an

industrial economy, but also of reinventing an economy of coexistence.

Today, the countless retired people who travel to the Mediterranean coasts are looking for

more than just sunshine and good weather; they are looking for the joys of life, for the pleasures

and the art of living. The Mediterranean art of living is extroverted, with its town square, its

stroll, its corso, which is also an art of communication. There is our gastrosophy which holds out

the olive and the olive branch to everyone. The continentals who come on holiday or for

longer periods in the still unspoiled spots are looking for an antidote to

mechanization, timekeeping, alienation, haste. In our cultures we have resources for resisting

standardization and uniformity. Our countryside, our towns, our monuments and our architecture

of the past are not just things of beauty, they give off waves that penetrate us, distilling juices

that make us convivial and instilling-intangible truths that become our truths. And isn't it our

mission to propagate this art of living following in the wake of our pizzas, our couscous, our

tarama, our tapas and our wines? But the defence and the illustration of a quality of life call for

resistance to the barbarous side of uncontrolled technoindustrial development, to the greed that
damages relations of mutual aid, to the proliferation of concrete and asphalt that has already

disfigured so much of our coastline ...

They also call for a policy of regeneration of the Mediterranean which obviously involves

decontaminating and repopulating the water. Sporadic steps have been taken in this direction, but

it is something which should be systematic and common. The policy we need is one which as far

as possible and wherever possible would mean a return to farming activities and the

development of quality agriculture, something which can already be seen in the viticulture

of many countries thanks to progress in the selection of vines, in wine-making processes, in the

use of organic ferments. Finally, it seems that thanks to genetic engineering we shall soon find

a way of growing plants that will absorb nitrogen from the air and reintroduce it into the earth,

thereby making infertile soils fertile.

In short, it is not just the defence of the quality of life, but the defence of life itself which

calls for an emigration policy, which will only be possible if we are capable of replacing

demographic fear and ethnic fear -today, unfortunately, too closely tied--with the resurrection of

the noble spirit of hospitality, feelings of neighbourliness, respect for others, a love of diversity.

But before anything else, we must mobilize against the great seismic rift that has invaded

the Mediterranean. We must stop looking on Islam and Arabism as monoliths or as an

aggression. We must take into account all the vexations, the refusals, all the unfair double-

dealing, all the deceptions ...

We must be partners, we must unite, we must once more give priority to everything we

have in common, restore the common identity in and under diversity, and find the identity of the

citizen of the Mediterranean within our many identities, because all of us have many identities

and our different identities must be interwoven in a spiral rather than rejecting each other.
 There is no profound fraternity without maternity: we must revitalize our mother sea.

There is a simplistic, exaggeratedly euphoric myth concerning the Mediterranean, which

ignores the fact that so many dislocations, destructions and intolerances come from the

Mediterranean itself. But we need a rich myth to express our aspiration to the fulfillment of our

greatest possibilities.

Ah! We need to be understanding, very understanding. What is understanding? What is it

that makes it different from and complementary to explanation? It is what allows us, human

subjects, to see others as subjects in their own image, as alter egos, and understand their feelings

and their reactions from within. Understanding others is an essential requirement of our time. But

this also involves a profound moral regeneration, a profound moral change: we must with all our

heart desire concord, reconciliation, compassion, forgiveness.

And I shall end my words with every Mediterranean's opening greeting:

peace be with you.

Peace be with us.

Que la pau sigui amb vosaltres.

Que la pau sigui amb nosaltres.

Note
Reproduced from Catalònia, 45, 1996, at http://www.raco.cat/index.php/Catalonia/ Accessed:

December 20, 2017.

Chapter 32: Ecology: The Uses of Enchantment
In a forum published by leading French daily, Le Monde, French sociologist and philosopher,

Edgar Morin, calls for a major shift in civilization placing greater emphasis on love, solidarity

and poetry. He claims that only an ecology-based policy seems capable of seeing such a project

through.

The success of the green coalition in the European parliamentary elections in France

should not be overestimated nor underestimated. It should not be overestimated, because it was

due in part to the weakness of the Socialist Party, and the poor credibility of the centrist MoDem

and smaller groups on the Left. At the same time, it should not be underestimated, because it also

highlights the political progress of environmental awareness in our country.

As a nation we now have a more developed awareness of the environment, but we remain

largely unaware of the relationship between politics and ecology, and this is a problem that must

be faced because issues of justice, government, equality and social relations effectively extend

beyond the sphere of environmentalism. Now that we can perceive the shortcomings of political

platforms with no environmental component, we should not overlook the deficiencies of political

programs that focus solely on environmental issues.

The vision of humankind as being "above nature" has yet to be replaced by a vision of

our complex interdependence with the natural world, whose death will also be our own. Political

ecology must face two aspects: one turned towards nature, and the other towards society. It

follows that a policy that seeks to replace polluting fossil fuels with clean energy sources also

has implications in terms of other policies that focus on health, hygiene, and quality of life. A

policy that aims to save energy is also part of a broader approach that aims to counteract the

consumerist delirium of the middle classes. Policies with goals such as the de-pollution of cities,
the development of electric public transport, the pedestrianization of historic urban centres, make

a major contribution to programmes to re-humanize cities, which also include plans to ensure

that residential areas have a mix of social classes and an end to ghettoes of all kinds, including

luxury ghettoes for privileged communities.

In practice, the second aspect of political ecology includes economic and social

components. But it also has a more profound significance that cannot be encapsulated by a

political programme: this is a recognition of the need to change our lives, not only in terms of

our use of energy, but also in terms of the quality and the poetry of life. This second aspect of

environmental politics has yet to be sufficiently developed in political ecology.

First and foremost, it has yet to assimilate this complementary second message, which

was formulated at the same time as the environmental message in the early 1970s, the message

of political and ecological thinker, Ivan Illich. Illich had formulated a groundbreaking critique of

our civilization, showing the extent to which a sense of psychological unease had accompanied

the progress of material well-being. This psychological unease is evident in the widespread

consumption of medicines, sleeping pills, anti-depressants, psychotherapies, psychoanalyses,

gurus, and the like, but it is not perceived to be an effect of civilization.

An overweening focus on the calculation of all aspects of human life has obscured the

fact that many things cannot be calculated: suffering, happiness, joy, love — in short, things that

are important in our lives but are particularly social or purely personal. All our solutions now

appear to be quantitative ones: economic growth, GDP growth, etc. But when will politics take

into account the immense need for love experienced by humankind, which feels lost in the

cosmos?
 A policy that integrates ecology as one aspect of the composite problem of the human

condition should address the problems posed by the negative effects –that increasingly outweigh

the positive—of the development of civilization, which include the depletion of solidarity and

fellowship. These policies should convince us that the need to build solidarity is of crucial

importance in any approach to civilization. It follows that political ecology should enter into a

regenerative phase that contributes to its renaissance.

Political ecology contains a measure of truth as well as a degree of shortsightedness, and

the same can be said of the parties on the traditional left that also have their truths, their errors,

and their weaknesses. All of these entities should be reassembled to create a regenerated political

force that could open up paths for political development. The economic path should lead to the

development of a plural economy. The social reform path should reduce inequalities along with

public and private bureaucracy, and encourage solidarity. The existential path should reform our

perception of life and generate a fully expressed awareness of the fact that we all innately sense

that love and understanding are the most precious properties for human beings and that what is

important, is to live poetically; that is to say, to develop ourselves in an ardent spirit of

communion.

And if it is true that our civilization, which is now a global one, has embarked on the path

of its own destruction to such an extent that we must change direction, all these new paths could

converge towards an historic metamorphosis of society that is even better than a revolution. We

have yet to witness the regeneration of politics. But political ecology could be the beginning of

the beginning.
Note
Reproduced from Le Monde, June 16, 2009
Chapter 33: Demythicising and Remythicising the
Mediterranean 1
Although the Mediterranean is evidently very old from a geographical and geological point of

view, the word itself is very recent, and refers to the grouping together of several seas

surrounded by land. Were there not already many seas between Anatolia and Gibraltar in ancient

times?

Of course the unification took place when it became the centre of the Roman Empire, the

Mare Nostrum, "our" sea. But it was not until the 18th century that it was called the

Mediterranean. It is a word which comes from a continental civilization and which, above all,

has connections with other continents, from a sea in the midst of lands; that is, Africa, Asia…2;

the sea which lies between these lands.

But as the Mediterranean became established as a word, so it secured itself as a reality,

clearly geographic and strategic, then political and soon after poetic and mythological, certainly

for the southern Europeans and even for the northern countries. Why? A poetic reality created by

the sun, the light, the blue of the sea, and the landscape, a landscape that even in winter never

withers. All this contributed to make up the Mediterranean pride, of course, but it became also a

source of desire, of nostalgia, for the populations of the north, the world of Germanic people

who, stuck away in their cold lands, dream of the Mediterranean.

Thus, it became a radiant idea―"discover the country where the orange tree grows," say

the French—and also a myth, a myth that personally I would qualify as euphoric and

reductionist, and which was mixed up with the Greco-Latin image that excluded everything other

than the porta eccolata, for the preservation solely of harmony, communication, and the source
of civilization, a civilization mainly conceived as Greek and Latin, and as a place encompassing

the good life.

But thinking of harmony, plenitude, and the gates of Greece and Rome, causes us to

exclude the cruelty of the wars. Yet, there were wars. Firstly, Rome’s terrible conquest of

Greece; followed by their equally horrendous conquest and destruction of Carthage. The South

was gradually forgotten, and the East too.

If we are to believe the history books, the Mediterranean is an area of antagonism and of

conflict, a domain of tremendous creation, but also of the destruction of civilizations. A region

encompassing not only rivalry amongst explorers, but also conflicts between the trading towns,

conflicts of ideas, of religion, and I would even say of the extraordinary natures that it includes.

Thus, the Mediterranean is a region which has hatched many, rich polytheisms: the

polytheism of the ancient Egyptian civilization and the polytheism of the Greeks and Romans. It

is also the place that has given rise to monotheism; I would even say to the three monotheisms

that are the branches of the same monotheism, which, instead of encouraging agreement and

collaboration within its various derivations, has created only conflict, something that is still very

much alive today.

Evidently, the Mediterranean is a place that has grown away from its mythology and a

place that founded clear reason and rationality while remaining a region of madness and

delirium. It is, effectively, a region that has sustained and nurtured scepticism.

It is also a region that has seen the birth of some of the most extravagant beliefs. In a way

it is a microcosm of the concoctions of the human mind and a place that is not only home to

Homo sapiens, but also Homo demens. Moreover, it is a region of amalgamation, which appears

to generate an amazing confusion. Braudel described it as the most extraordinary mixture of

races, religions, customs and civilizations that the earth has ever known.3 So, we ask ourselves,

where is this harmony? Where is this beautiful thing, this wisdom, if what we find instead is this

sensation of chaos?

In fact, this chaos is only an image of the complexity of the Mediterranean. The word

complex means an ensemble, an ensemble of extremely diverse and heterogeneous elements that

are related to each other, because even an antagonism associates its two conflicting elements.

And this destructive chaos has also been constructive.

I refer to the words of Heraclitus, a pre-Socratic philosopher, who said: "Unite what is

agreed on with what is disagreed on." It is certainly a place both of agreement and disagreement

and, above all, a matrix. In other words, it is a fertile, productive, cultivating place, and a

generator of diversity. We could even say that the conflicts have been integrated as a civilizing

influence into the ideology of democracy, because, in the end, a democracy is only given form

through the confrontation of antagonistic ideals, which are played against each other according to

the peaceful rules of democracy; therefore, avoiding a violent and brutal conflict. However, at

the same time, it is a place where ideas can be challenged without the interlocutors physically

exterminating each other. Philosophy and democracy were instituted in Athens during the same

era. Moreover, the Mediterranean has been witness to the incredible phenomenon of the

vanquished being those who civilize the vanquishers. There is a famous adage: the vanquished

Greece revolted in fury to vanquish its vanquishers. The Roman Empire, when destroying

Greece ―it ransacked Corinth― loaded several Greek thinkers and books into its saddlebags so

that some centuries later the whole Roman Empire spoke Greek, and Greece’s influence was felt

all through Roman art and thought. Evidently, the civilization of the vanquishers depends on

their not eradicating the vanquished, as Carthage, the Punic Carthage, was devastated. All this
destruction must not be wiped from common memory, which is why the myth of the

Mediterranean, as both reductionist and euphoric, must end, must be left behind.

However, you will say, why do I refer to remythicising the Mediterranean when,

apparently, it ought to be demythicised? Firstly, what does remythicising mean? It obviously

means the reassertion of strong affective, almost sacred, values, as to what the Mediterranean is

and what it is conceived as. But, in order to do so, we must highlight the most important positive

contribution of the Mediterranean. What would that be? Its great contribution is its universality

and its universal ideas. These universal ideas will be found in the Mediterranean regions. They

even appeared in Egyptian antiquity with the worship of Aten, in the reign of Akenaten, which

for a time drove out the worship of the gods of the Egyptian pantheon. Aten was, of course,

expelled by the priests, but it is possible to perceive this universal potentiality, which is later

found in the message of Abraham and, more explicitly, in the writings of Paul.

For Paul, there are neither Jews nor gentiles. There are no more Greeks. They are all the

same. In other words, there is universalism in the writings of Paul as there is a universalism in

Islamic thought and Muhammad’s preaching. Of course, we all know very well that this

universalism has not prevented any of these religions from being extremely particularistic, or

believing themselves the possessors of a revealed truth, which has led time and time again to

religious wars. Wars, moreover, which never broke out during the reign of polytheism and

pluralism of gods. Of course, we find universalism in Greek philosophy; we find it in late Roman

law; and in the principle of democracy. And it was to be regenerated in the Humanism which

emerged in Italy after the Quattrocento.4 Thus, this deeply rooted concept of universality, despite

being co-existent with its contrary ideal, is the most important idea in the Mediterranean.
 This is what produces the virtues of universalism: meetings, exchanges, interracial

breeding; I would even say the advantages of migration, which, even today, continues to be a

very important and useful thing, perhaps even necessary, both for the Northern and Southern

Mediterranean.

But I think that remythicising the Mediterranean does not only mean picking out the

positive elements to form a selection, but also finding and understanding the spirit of the matrix

from which such a diversity of cultures and ideas has emerged.

There is something generic about what has formed in the Mediterranean through the

convergence of so many cultures. To explain what I mean by generic, I will use a metaphor.

Biologists discovered not long ago that our organisms contained what are called stem cells. Stem

cells are the embryonic cells of all animals, including humans. These cells have the greatest

creative capacity of all, due to the fact that they are not specialized in any particular thing, and,

for this reason, they are known as omnipotent.

The study of these stem cells is of crucial importance, and we are even talking at present

of embryonic cloning for the purpose of using them to regenerate organisms, for instance a

diseased heart or a defective liver. We have stem cells in our brains and in our spinal cords, but it

has been recently discovered that they may be inactive or, at least, that they must be stimulated. I

would use this description as a metaphor to say that such a thing exists as Mediterranean

humanism stem cells, which are what have made the various civilizations possible.

However, when a civilization becomes inflexible or a belief becomes a dogma, clearly it

becomes sterile and immobilized. At the root of the issue is this question: what does

rediscovering and regenerating the Mediterranean mean? Well, it means rediscovering what it

possesses in the sense of a generative matrix; it means rediscovering the inhibited or repressed
potential within the different civilizations; it means finding in the Mediterranean what Paul

Valéry5 was referring to when he called it: "a machine that makes civilization".

If we take seriously the idea that it is possible to find a regenerative matrix, we arrive at

the necessary remythicisation of the Mediterranean, because a myth is a strong idea, endowed

with a power that is effective and great, and almost mystical. This remythicisation is in fact

based on the image of the sea, perhaps because the sea is a source of life, and we know or we can

presume that life was started there, conceived there, that the first unicellular life was created in

an aquatic environment; if not in the sea, then at least aquatic. Moreover, our blood still contains

a large quantity of salt. We retain something of this origin. Deeply inset within our mythologies,

there is a link between the ideas of the sea and the mother, maternity and the sea.6 We give the

sea an element of mother and of matrix. Curiously, the Mediterranean is both vastly open and

extremely closed: geological fate has enclosed it, unlike the ocean, which is infinite, limitless.

This sea, which is huge, but which, however, is on a human scale and which enables us to

travel to neighboring lands, whether they are friend or foe, must be perceived in a profoundly

affective sense. Without maternity, there is no fraternity. We know this unconsciously, given that

we, as members of nation, have a very strong feeling for what can be called “patria”. What does

patria mean? Patria is word, which in itself has both maternal and paternal elements. It is a

hermaphroditic word, which begins as masculine with “pater”, father, and ends with the feminine

“tria”. Moreover, we say "the mother country"; we maternalise the patria out of love just as we

paternalise it because of the authority to which we owe respect and obedience.

The beginning of the French national anthem, "La Marseillaise", which goes “Allons

enfants de la patrie" (Onward sons of the patria), expresses this idea, which creates a fraternalism

between us. It is, therefore, evident that, based upon this maternal element of the Mediterranean,
we will eventually be capable of fraternalism. We also rejoice at the fact that, basically, the

concepts of light and blue are closely linked to the Mediterranean Sea and that, despite all our

pains and miseries, we feel the joy of being Mediterranean.

If we have this maternal concept of the Mediterranean Sea deep within us, we must have,

at the same time, the idea that we have to do everything possible for its preservation and to save

it from any danger. This leads us directly to the ecology of the Mediterranean for this sea is the

victim of large amounts of pollution that come from industrialization and modern urbanization,

and we are putting its very life at risk. In order to maternalise the Mediterranean, we must award

its internal borders only a secondary importance, to encourage the move towards understanding

and accordance, and to achieve the sense of a common identity. Our Mediterranean mythology,

unlike myths that spawn ideas that are intolerant and dogmatic brings instead unification. If, as I

have suggested, we take the best of the Mediterranean concept, the Mediterranean will enable us

to make something sacred from something profane.

Notes
1. Originally published by the Insitut Europeu du la Mediterrània at

http://www.iemed.org/publicacions/quaderns/4/amorin.pdf accessed December 20, 2017.

2. The Latin word mediterraneus is formed by medius “middle” and terra “land”.

(Translator’s note)

3. Fernand Braudel, 1902-1985, was a French scholar and key member of the Annales

School. AHC

4. Fifteenth century. AHC

5. Paul Valéry, 1871-1905, was a French poet and philosopher who also wrote on current

affairs. AHC

6. A play on words in the original French with mer (sea) and mère (mother). (Translator’s

note).