Edgar Morin

Context

Richard Hames:

" The second half of the twentieth century produced a remarkable constellation of thinkers working in the same territory from different disciplines: Gregory Bateson on the ecology of mind, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela on autopoiesis, Ilya Prigogine on dissipative structures, Stuart Kauffman on fitness landscapes, and Stafford Beer on the viable organisation. Each of them, in their own idiom, were making a version of Morin’s argument: that the dominant epistemology is not merely incomplete but actively dangerous, because it generates confidence in the wrong instruments at precisely the moment when the right ones are most urgently required.

What Morin did that none of them did with the same sustained ambition was attempt a full synthesis — a general theory of complexity that could account for the physical, the biological, the anthropological, and the noological simultaneously, without reducing any of them to the terms of the others. Six volumes. Three decades. A project whose scale was, by any measure, audacious to the point of hubris — except that it worked or worked well enough that the questions it raised will outlast the particular frameworks in which they were raised, which is perhaps the best measure of genuine intellectual work.

And it was ignored. Not entirely—he had his readers, his influence, his moments of institutional recognition, and his dinner with Macron when he turned 100. But the dominant culture of knowledge production — the universities, the think tanks, the policy institutes, the management schools, the consulting firms, the whole apparatus through which a civilisation’s self-understanding is produced and reproduced — continued largely as though he had not written a word.

The reductionist epistemology continued to produce reductionist interventions in complex systems, with the predictable results. The climate negotiations continued to treat a complex adaptive system as though it were a complicated engineering problem with knowable variables and controllable outcomes. The development agenda continued to export models designed for one kind of society into societies whose complexity made those models not simply ineffective but actively destabilising. The organisations continued to optimise for measurable outcomes while the unmeasured dimensions — culture, relationships, trust, and meaning — quietly determined everything.

Morin watched all of this. He didn’t become bitter, which is perhaps the most remarkable thing about him. He became more insistent."

(https://richarddavidhames.substack.com/p/the-thinker-the-century-couldnt-hear)