Lost Paradigm of Edgar Morin
* Book: Edgar Morin's Le paradigme perdu: la nature humaine. 1973.
URL = https://lhumaine.numerev.com/pdf/articles/revue-2/2926-edgar-morin#
In english: The Lost Paradigm: Human Nature.
Description
DeepSeek, prompted by Michel Bauwens:
The 'Lost Paradigm' is a foundational work in the French sociologist and philosopher's vast oeuvre.
Published in 1973, the book originated from a 1972 international symposium on the "unity of man." Its central, radical argument is this: we must stop cleaving nature from culture. Morin insists that "the key of culture is in our nature, and the key of nature is in our culture."
He fiercely rejects reductive definitions of humanity—whether as
- Homo faber (the tool-maker) or
- Homo sapiens (the wise man).
Instead, he proposes the far more complex, paradoxical figure of Homo sapiens-demens (wise-manic man). For Morin, rationality, myth, magic, ecstasy, and even delirium are not aberrations but are fundamentally interwoven into what it means to be human.
To understand us, we must hold these opposites together.
This book is not just an anthropology text; it is a epistemological declaration of war against classical Western science. It is the very first cornerstone of Morin's entire "Complex Thought" (pensée complexe) project, acting as the prelude and sketch for his later six-volume magnum opus, La Méthode. He attacks the "great paradigm" that has dominated Western thought since the 17th century—the reductionist practice of carving knowledge into isolated, airtight disciplines.
A New Paradigm: He rejects both
- biologism (reducing humans to mere biology) and
- anthropologism (studying humans as if they floated free of their biological anchors).
His alternative is a paradigm that connects biology and anthropology, seeing the human as an integrated "bio-psycho-social" (biologique-psychologique-sociologique) being.