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viii Foreword

EDGAR MORIN: A BIBLIO-BIOGRAPHY

Perhaps the best way to provide a contextual introduction to Morin's work

is through an outline of his intellectual trajectory, in the form of a "biblio-
biography." A review of Morin's journey helps us, 1 believe, to better under­
stand the man and his mission in the essays that follow.
Edgar Morin's work has been tremendously influential in Europe, Latin
America, and French-speaking Africa. Numerous monographs discussing his
work have been written in France, Spain, Italy, Brazil, Canada, and England
(Anselmo, 2005, 2006; Bianchi, 2001; Fages, 1980; Fortin, 2002; Kofman, 1996;
Rosetto Ajello, 2003). The extent of his influence in diverse and even remote
fields exceeds perhaps even Gregory Bateson's. Emeritus Director oi Research at
the CNRS (the French National Research Center), Morin has received honorary
doctorates (appropriately in subjects ranging from political science to psycholo­
gy to sociology) from universities including Messina, Geneva, Milan, La Paz,
Odense, Perugia, Cosenza, Palermo, Nuevo Leon (Mexico), Brussels, Valencia,
the Catholic University of Porto Alegre, and the Universidade Federal do Rio
Grande do Norte, among others, and holds an itinerant UNESCO chair in
Complex Thought. Morin's imprint is to be found in fields ranging from media
studies to visual anthropology to cinema verite to philosophy to action research
to sociology to systems theory to ecology to education, and recently with increas­
ing frequency in the hard sciences. Just to give a small indication ol the range of
his influence, in English, a language in which his work is relatively little known,
he is cited by such diverse scholars as historian of religion Mircea Eliade (Eliade,
1978), sociologist Lewis Coser (Coser, 1997), psychoanalyst Andre Green
(Green, 2005), physicist Basarab Nicolescu (Nicolescu, 1997), philosopher Julia
Kristeva (Kristeva, 1997), historian Daniel J. Boorstin (Boorstin, 1992), philoso­
phers of science Gianluca Bocchi and Mauro Ceruti (Bocchi & Ceruti, 2002),
Islamic scholar and Moroccan Imam Abdessalam Yassine (Yassine, 2000), math­
ematician William Byers (Byers, 2007), Mexican Nobel Laureate in Literature
Octavio Paz (Paz, 1986), lain Chambers, the English scholar of cultural and post-
colonial studies (Chambers, 1994), and therapist/philosopher Paul Watzlawick
(Watzlawick, 1977).
As Kofman states in his volume on Morin for the Pluto Press series on
Modern European Thinkers,

Morin's approach is in harmony with a new culture of uncertainty as

instanced in the literary and philosophic writings of Derrida, Levinas, or
Deleuze. But unlike his fellow travelers Morin has been alone in daring to
attempt a method which connects sciences and philosophy through com­
plexity. In French intellectual life today Morin is a now leader but still an
outsider. (Kofman, 1996)
Foreword ix

The 21st century has seen several research centers devoted to Morin's work,
including one at the University of Messina in Sicily, and most notably the inau­
guration of Multiversidad Mundo Real Edgar Morin, a university in Hermosillo
(Sonora) Mexico, based on the principles of Morins work.
Morin's books address such a variety of issues that it's necessary to first cat­
alog some of them, at least a small selection out of the 60 or so books he has
published, in order to get an idea of the scope of his work. In the process, we
can begin to see the "path laid down in walking," and to recognize the threads
that tie much of Morins work together.
For a useful introduction to Morin in English, the reader is referred to
Myron Kofman's (1996) Edgar Morin: Erom Big Brother to Fraternity, in the Pluto
Press Modern European Thinkers series. Kofman is particularly good on the
historical context and Morins experience with Hegelian-Marxism. Given the
relatively short space here, and the vast range of Morins experience, I refer to
Kofman's work for a discussion of this fascinating period and its influence on
Morin's thought. Morin's Homeland Earth offers an accessible introduction to his
socio-political and moral thought.

Beginnings...

Morin's first book was EAn Zero de I'Allemagne [Germany Year Zero], written
right after the end of World War II when Morin, then in his mid-20s, was in
Germany with the French Army. Germany Year Zero was his eflort 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 "sale 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 called complex thought, his refusal to reduce and thereby mutilate.
Briefly, complex thought does not reduce and polarize. Morin does not want to
reduce Germany and its people to the actions of the Nazis, which in the imme­
diate aftermath of the war was all too easily done. This refusal to reduce, to take
a Manichean, simplistic view (a view that is often driven by fear, anger, and
other emotions, but often masquerades as coldly rational), is a central element
of Morin's thought.
The term reductionism is used with great, perhaps excessive, Irequency
these days. With Morin it is not some theoretical abstraction, a form of name-
calling. Instead, with Morin it emerges from, and is embedded in, the existen­
tial reality of daily life. It manifests in the unwillingness to take a reductionist
X Foreword

stance to the German people. It refuses to equate Germans and Germany only
with the Nazis and the Holocaust. It would be all too easy to say that the
German reduction of Jews warrants an equal reduction of Germans, as "pure
evil," or some similar stance. But Morin insists on viewing Germans in their full
complexity. He explores why and how, given the complexity of the German
people, they fell victim to the Nazi scourge. And most importantly, he always
reminds us that as human beings we are all vulnerable to episodes of madness.
Morin reminds us that the dualism of good versus evil all too easily leads us to
believe that "they" are "evil," and "we" are by definition "good," and therefore
anything we do is also by definition good and legitimate. Crucial here is that
the belief in "our" inherent goodness is accompanied by a lack of self-reflection
and self-criticism, usually with disastrous results. 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 Morins
work. As Selvini Palazzoli (1990) writes:

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)

Another theme from Morins earliest works that later came up in a debate in
2000 with Jacques Derrida in the pages of Le Monde is Morins insistence on the
vital importance of forgiveness. For Derrida, forgiveness should be an excep­
tion, at the edge of impossibility. For Morin, forgiveness is a resistance to the
cruelty of the world—the title of his response to Derrida (Morin, February
2000). Once again, this involves precisely the refusal to perpetuate the very atti­
tudes that provoke conflict and keep the cycle of violence and hatred going.
Forgiveness is what takes us beyond simplistic, dualistic thinking, and leads us
toward a politics of civilization (Morin &r Nair, 1997). For Morin, forgiveness is a
virtue we must cultivate, even when it seems easier and more immediate to hate.
It should be pointed out that Morin's work is by no means saccharine or
Pollyanna-ish, devoid of realism and ungrounded in an awareness of the real
terror humans have inflicted upon each other. Indeed, in his popular book
Homeland Earth (Morin & Kern, 1999), he speaks of a "Gospel of Doom" that
recognizes our fate and invites us to stare it in the face and view it as an invi­
tation for human solidarity, to come together under the recognition that we are
all in the same existential boat. In Morin we find a mature compassion that
comes from having experienced first-hand, as a resistance fighter and French
citizen, the horror that was unleashed on his own country and the rest of
Europe. Morin's unwillingness to demonize might be viewed as a "tender-
Foreword xi

minded" unwillingness to face the harsh realities of life and take a stand, a
position of "friendly weakness." Nothing could be further from the truth. In
fact, Morins view is that the cycle of horror and violence will be perpetuated
precisely because we demonize others and are unwilling to forgive, to recog­
nize the extent to which we all, as humans, are capable of an extreme range of
behaviors. The unquestioned belief in ones own "goodness" can lead, through
a process Jung called "enantiodromia," to a coincidence of opposites, where
the very actions taken to fight the enemy bring about the conditions that the
enemy's victory would ensure. Where, for instance, a democratic country
fighting a totalitarian regime resorts to such drastic draconian actions that it
actually destroys the very democratic principles it is allegedly attempting to
safeguard.
Morin has a strong affinity for certain aspects of Buddhism, having seen the
extent of our human capacity for love and hate, our intelligence and our stu­
pidity. His wisdom and compassion come from having looked within and with­
out deeply and with great depth of feeling. As the eminent sociologist Alain
Touraine wrote, quoting the African Terentius, it can be said of Morin, more
than any thinker in our era, that nothing human is alien to him (Touraine,
2001). This includes, for instance, recognizing that the gruesome actions of
ordinary German citizens were not performed by exceptional, evil monsters,
but by ordinary human beings. Research in social psychology, from Milgram to
Zimbardo, was later to show how "the power of the situation" could turn edu­
cated citizens into Nazi killers. "Nice" Stanford students could, within a matter
of hours, treat "prisoners" in an experimental setting, their fellow students,
much the same way that some military personnel in tremendously stressful and
exceptional conditions treated prisoners whom they believed would not think
twice about killing them if released. Morins particular gift is to show us how
there, but for the grace of God, go all of us.
Morins first book was the inspiration for the classic Italian neo-Realist
movie Germany Year Zero iGermania Anno Zero] by Roberto Rossellini. Morin
has had an ongoing relationship of mutual influence with the arts and artists
around the world. This is another aspect of his work that makes him so unique
in the often dreary and secluded world of the social sciences. Examples include
Morins delightful reflections about New York, a collaboration with Dutch visu­
al artist Karel Appel (Morin & Appel, 1984), and his influence on, among oth­
ers, the great Brazilian songwriter Caetano Veloso, who explicitly discusses the
importance of Morins work for his artistic vision and for Brazil's resistance
against authoritarian government (Veloso, 2003), and his relationship with
such figures as novelist Marguerite Duras. Most recently we have seen the pub­
lication of Peuples, a book of photographs of peoples from all over the world by
Pierre de Vallombreuse with Morins commentary (de Vallombreuse & Morin,
2006).
xii Foreword

Morin's next work was LHomme et la Mart [Humanity and Death) (1951).
Here we find, in typically Morinian fashion, a sustained meditation on death
that is both deeply personal and planetary, both holographic and multidimension­
al, to use terms Morin was to employ later. It is personal, because Morin lost
his mother at an early age, and the event affected him profoundly. It haunts his
work in too many ways to address in this brief sketch. A thoughtful discussion
of the role Morin's mothers death played in his life can be found in Heinz
Weinmann's introduction to the collection of Morin essays entitled La
Complexite Humaine (Morin, 1994b). Morin's work is planetary in scope
because he explores death cross-culturally in the great religions and spiritual
traditions, throughout human history, and in the sciences, finding that the plu­
rality of interpretive frameworks shed light, each in a different way, on the most
profound event. Morin's work has always had this holographic, multidimen­
sional quality: the part and the whole are always interconnected, and one finds
the part in the whole and the whole in the part; and the subject is approached
from a variety of dimensions, from the biological to the cultural to the psycho­
logical and mythological.
Morin's approach has always been both planetary and personal. We later
find wonderful examples of this holographic method in Vidal et les Siens [Vidal
and his People] (Morin, 1996), which is at once a biography of his father, Vidal,
a history of Sephardic Jews, and a history of Europe, and in Pour Sortir du
Ventieme Sit'de [Entering the 20th Century] (Morin, 2004b), in which Morin
addresses key political issues through a combination of theoretical and histori­
cal reflection on the state of the world grounded with examples from his own
experience.
Morin's book on death brings together two themes that will recur through­
out his work. The motivation for inquiry emerges from personal experience,
most dramatically with the death of his mother, not abstract speculation or dis­
ciplinary agendas. Another key element in this work is transdisciplinarity.
Morin's inquiry is not limited to one discipline. It draws on a whole range of
pertinent knowledge (Morin, 2001b). In other words, he is not approaching his
subject from what 1 have elsewhere called a discipline-driven perspective
(Montuori, 2005). He is not driven by problem solving in the context of the
agenda of a specific discipline. Rather, he is motivated by his own experience,
in this case his loss, by the need to make sense of lived human experience, his
own and that of every other human being. This is central to what makes Morin's
vision of transdisciplinarity so important and so timely: it is grounded not in
attempts to create abstract theoretical frameworks, or to further the agenda of
a new discipline, but 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 usually left out of academic discourse precisely because
they are too complex and transdisciplinary. Lived experience simply cannot sat­
isfactorily be reduced to the perspective of one discipline.
Foreword xiii

Autocritique

Morin's early work on death shows his willingness to grapple with profound
existential issues so often obliterated in the all-too-often sterile discourse of
social science and philosophy. This existential aliveness, this grounding in the
lived experience of the realities of existence, is present in Morin's work whether
he is discussing cybernetics, cinema, self-organization, ecology, politics, or edu­
cation 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, and to provide the sciences
with tools 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, by giving is a unidimensional, anemic, antiseptic, homogenized purs pro
toto. This transdisciplinary approach could later be seen in the journal
Arguments that Morin led along with Roland Barthes, Kostas Axelos, and others
from 1956 to 1962. The broad range of topics addressed in the journal reflect­
ed a focus on issues rather than disciplinary agendas, and a willingness to range
far and wide.
After World War 11. 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 inde­
pendent thought was clearly transgressive, and in Autocritique Morin (2004a)
documents his expulsion from the party for writing an "inappropriate" article.
Morin's Autocritique is a remarkable document from an "engaged" intellectual
grappling with the complexities of politics and self-deception. It is a model of
honesty and sell-reflection and 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, primarily Stalin's rise to power and the
repression in the Eastern block countries. Drake (2002) provides some context,
l ie writes that Morin was "one of the few PCF (French Communist Party) intel­
lectuals who refused to blindly follow the Party line" (p. 70). Exploring such
phenomena as self-deception, cognitive dissonance, groupthink, and authori­
tarian/totalitarian thinking and behavior in himself and in "the party," we find
another theme that will run through all of Morin's future work. In his 7 Complex
Lessons in Education for the Future (Morin, 2001b), a document Morin 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?"
xiv Foreword

The fierce independence of judgment so characteristic of creative individ­

uals (Barron, 1995) has always marked Morin's life and work. It has often
made him unpopular with those who would find shelter in the warm embrace
of "in-group" conformity, those who want to tow the ideological line and build
strong immune defenses around the hard nucleus of doctrine—the core that
cannot be challenged (Morin, 1991). Morin never "belonged" in the sense of
relinquishing his own independence to gain the considerable favors offered by
those who were "connected" and "insiders," whether in the form of publishing
contracts, intellectual movements, or, ironically, notoriety in the United States.
Whereas there are some parallels between Morin's thought and some of the
French authors associated in the United States with the postmodern turn (and,
it should be noted, some pointed and vital differences), Morin has never asso­
ciated himself with postmodernism as a movement and intellectual bandwag­
on and rarely if ever uses the term. French authors who are closely associated
with postmodernism were extensively published in the United States, while
authors who were considered major figures in France were sidelined because
they could not be identified with the hot new trend. It is interesting to note
that in the United States French thought over the last few decades is associat­
ed almost exclusively with postmodernism. In France, on the other hand,
postmodernism is considered a largely Anglophone phenomenon (journet,
2000).
In non-English speaking countries, ranging from Brazil to Colombia to Italy
and Spain, and in France itself, of course, Morin has been recognized as one of
the most significant thinkers of our time. The gap between the Anglophone
world and the rest of the planet is fascinating, and speaks volumes about the
inevitably partial nature of any understanding of European intellectual life
determined as it is by publishers, mastery of languages other than English (since
translations are themselves a whole other issues, as evidenced by the highly
problematic English translations of Piaget, for instance), and other issues.
Autocritique (Morin, 2004a) marks an important turning point for Morin.
We normally assume that we have ideas; however, it became clear to Morin that
ideas can also have us—literally possess us. Human beings can literally be pos­
sessed by ideologies and belief systems, whether on the left or the right,
whether in science or religion. Henceforth, Morin's effort will 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 fundamen­
tal assumptions underlying a system of thought, and always alert for the ways
in which, covertly or overtly, we create inviolate centers that cannot be ques­
tioned or challenged. Knowledge always requires the knowledge ol knowledge,
the ongoing investigation and interrogation of how we construct knowledge.
Indeed, Knowledge of Knowledge is the title of the third volume of Morin's Method
(Morin, 1986).
Foreword xv

S o c i o l o g y a n d P o p u l a r Culture

At the same time that Morin was exploring such a weighty subject as 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 and participation in 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 path-breaking works about cinema, the star system, and popular
culture. Several of these books, originally published from the mid 1950s to the
early 1960s, have been published or re-issued in the United States by the
University ol Minnesota Press (Morin, 2005a, 2005b). 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 sensational­
ist scholarship. 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 val­
ues. Mortimer pointedly reminds us of how the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu
attacked Morin's study of mass culture because it was "an instrument of alien­
ation at the service of capitalism to divert the proletariat from its revolutionary
mission" (Mortimer, 2001, p. 78). This once again gives us an idea of Morin's
constant battle against reductionism, the attempt to reduce a complex phenom­
enon to one potential aspect and manifestation, and in the process dismiss it.
In the case of Bourdieu, we find a view of cinema that does not take into
account the infinite emotional, social, and other complexities that the experi­
ence affords us. It is deeply doctrinaire by reducing the enormous complexity
of cinema to, in Bourdieu's trite and cliche-ridden critique, "an instrument of
alienation at the service of capitalism to divert the proletariat from its revolu­
tionary mission." In the late 1950s in The Stars (Morin, 2005a), he was also the
only thinker associated with the at the time completely counter-cultural idea
that the cult of celebrity has a strong religious component (Young, 2002).
Interestingly, Young goes on to cite research conducted in the United Kingdom
and the United States that suggests celebrity worship does indeed play a role
similar to that of religion and is the source of new "myths" and mythical figures
in today's society.
Morin was one of the first academics to take popular culture seriously. His
psychoanalytically influenced discussion o! 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 enor­
mous impact on people's lives. Among other things, Morin studied the seem-
xvi Foreword

ingly 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 toward their idols.
This reflects a guiding principle of Morins 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 reduction-
ism and holism.
But why this sudden detour into cinema? Morins research is motivated by
his own life experiences. After the death of his mother, the young Morin
became an obsessive movie-goer, and developed a fascination for the magical
dimensions of cinema. It allowed him to temporarily inhabit and dream of a
different world, escape his pain, and immerse himself in a world of creativity
and imagination through a ritualistic process not unlike the experiences of art
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 Morins case this is particularly evident, and central, as 1 have sug­
gested, to his transdisciplinary approach, which does not seek to simply solve
a problem, but is a quest for meaning derived from his own personal experi­
ence, and clearly from that of millions of other movie-goers.
In 1961, film-maker 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, culminating
in the events of 1968, this documentary holds the distinction of being recog­
nized as the first example of cinema verite. It breaks down the barrier between
the camera and the subject in a precursor to a far more participative approach
to inquiry and documenting events, and the more recent excesses of "reality tel­
evision." Roland Barthes wrote, "What this film engages is humanity itself." In
his review of documentary filmmaking, Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film
Revisited, Brian Winston (1995) referred to Chronicle of a Summer as the key cin­
ema verite film.
The documentary had a profound influence on French film-maker Jean-
Luc Godard, and has become a classic of documentary making and visual
anthropology. Particularly important is the self-reflective dimension, which
includes interviewees being filmed observing footage of their interviews, creat­
ing a self-reflective loop (Ungar, 2003). This innovative approach shows
Morin's lifelong concern for inter-subjectivity and self-reflection that was later
to be articulated extensively in his works of sociology and complex thought
(Morin, 1994b, 1994c, 2008).
The publication of Introduction a une politique de 1'homme. Arguments poli-
tiques [Introduction to a politics of humanity. Political perspectives) (Morin,
1999a) in 1965 was the next step in Morin's political reflections. Here Morin
Foreword xvii

explored the nature of human nature in the political context, critiquing Marx,
Freud, and other 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 approach­
es 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 [Paradigm Lost) (Morin, 1979) Morin's transdisciplinary
approach crosses and integrates a plurality of disciplines, and a key dimension
of transdisciplinarity is understanding the way that knowledge is constructed
in various disciplines and approaches (Montuori. 2005a) Morin's work is rad­
ical in this sense because it traces the roots of knowledge, digging deep to find
the underlying assumptions that form the foundations for the differing perspec­
tives. Transdisciplinarity explicitly surfaces the assumptions of the many differ­
ent disciplines it addresses. Although not demanding in-depth expertise and
specialization to quite the same extent that 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 to uncover the assumptions of the various perspectives that inform
inquiry.
Morin's next two works, written in the mid-1960s, followed somewhat
naturally from his Cinema Verite 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 fortu­
nately translated into English. The Red and the White (Morin, 1970), a study of
modernization in the Breton village of Plozevet, utilized Morin's "phenomeno-
graphic" approach, a precursor to the recent boom in qualitative research
methodologies, at a time when most if not all sociological research was quan­
titative. Morin and his research team actively participated in the life of the vil­
lage and collected data in a variety of ways, from the quantitative to the quali­
tative, by living in the village and keeping diaries about their experience as
researchers. These diaries and have recently been published in their entirety
(Morin, 2001a). The Red and the White shows Morin's desire to capture the full
complexity and richness of this village, and the realization that traditional soci­
ological methods simply did not come close to this—they did not address the
lived experience of human beings undergoing a major social change.
Rumor in Orleans (Morin, 1971) is the fascinating and disturbing account
of a rumor about alleged white slave trade conducted by Jews in the city of
Orleans, which led to some degree of panic and attacks on stores owned by
Jews. Morin's research managed to unravel the web and actually laid the rumor
to rest. Again we see Morin at the leading edge of thought with what would be
xviii Foreword

called "action research" today. Morin broke down the assumptions that research
should be quantitative and 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" (Morin, 1993, 1994c).
Discussing his methodology, Morin wrote:

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 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, partici­
pation and sympathy in relation to the object as subject. As this object and
subject are one, our approach must be a dual one. (Morin, 1970, p. 259)

From his work on popular culture to cinema verite to his participatory research
approach, Morin challenges assumptions about high and low culture, the
objectivity and distance of the researcher and the camera, and the critique of
expertism that instead favors immersion and participation in the everyday, and
draws on the knowledge of nonspecialized participants. This is part of Moriris
larger thrust to bring the discourse of social science in much closer relationship
to the lived realities of human experience, the contingencies, the seeming triv­
ialities, the emotions, subjectivities, and uniqueness of life in all its manifesta­
tions, while at the same time uncovering the epistemological dimension,
addressing how we make sense of the world, how we construct our knowledge.

Journals

In the early 1960s Morin began publishing selected journals. These were very
personal reflections and explorations that chronicled his experiences from the
Foreword xix

very mundane to the dramatic, from the profound philosophical and psycho­
logical reflections of Le Vij du Sujet (Morin, 1982) to the account of his voyage
to China in the 1990s (Morin, 1992b). These documents showed the author
grappling with issues in the moment, and with his own responses to the crises
he was facing, whether intellectual or personal. Particularly fascinating is the
California Journal, soon to be published in English. This is an account of Morins
year in California during the height of the 1960s, spent at the Salk Institute in
San Diego, in the company of Jonas Salk, Frangois Jacob, and Anthony Wilden,
among others. Morin immersed himself in biology, cybernetics, and systems
theories, and reflected on the dramatic social changes he was witnessing.
California Journal provides a vibrant portrait of a changing society by a complex
man whose Mediterranean sensibility pervades his life and work. Tellingly, we
find none of the "mixture of condescension and envy found in the now-popular
travelogues of European intellectuals in the United States.
Many of his closest colleagues and collaborators have considered Morin's
journals to be some of his deepest and most significant contributions. The
authors 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, apartment-hunting in Paris, or at a conference.
Ironically, some of Morins journals have been attacked by critics who have
found them lacking the "seriousness" one should find in an academic.
Apparently intellectuals can write weighty tomes about popular culture (now
that Morin has contributed to making it an acceptable subject of study) but can­
not admit to enjoying it. It seems the serious academic is not entitled to discuss
that s/he eats and drinks, watches late night television, or enjoys soccer, but
only superciliously reflect on the extent to which "the masses" are bamboozled
by the media and pop culture—a clear hangover from the attitude that Bourdieu
represented so clearly. Its acceptable to look at the impact of popular culture on
others, but not on the academic him or herself. Academia is still very suspicious
of "subjectivity," which essentially amounts to the everyday experience of life,
and particularly of the subjectivity of the academic! Ones subjectivity, one's
domestic life need to be neatly compartmentalized and strictly separated from
one's life as a scholar. Although it is acceptable to engage in phenomenological
research of lived experience—somebody else's, of course—-it is largely only fem­
inist scholars who have stressed the 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 other pursuits, movies,
house-hunting, his wife's asthma attacks, pets, conferences, friendships, pub­
lishers, and the occasional overindulgence at dinner. A philosophy of life can­
not exclude these moments from its purview.
The pretense of objectivity unsullied by the contingency of life has never
been something Morin aspired to. In fact, he has been actively working on dis­
mantling it. He has also been aware that this academic front has all too often
XX Foreword

acted a cover for immature emotionality and self-deception. Morin breaks away
forcefully from the reductive image of the intellectual as a disembodied brain
with a huge ego (which goes unacknowledged, of course, given the stress on
objectivity), and opens himself up to us in his work and his actions, for scruti­
ny, exploration, and appreciation, showing himself to us in the full range of his
life experiences. As Maturana and Varela remind us. everything that is said is
said by somebody (Maturana & Varela, 1987). In traditional academic discourse
and inquiry, the locus 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.
The personal exploration of his journals has, at times, led us deeply into
Morin's psyche in ways that would be inconceivable lor most traditional social
scientists, for whom vulnerability is not generally considered a virtue. Indeed,
what is perhaps overlooked is that most social scientists, particularly those who
express themselves only in the confines of the professional |ournal. are simply
unable 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 "sub]ecttve" and the "objective" co-create each other, let alone deeply
question the underlying assumption of his or her work. Autobiography and
self-reflection are an awkward endeavor in social science. They are olten looked
upon with suspicion mixed with grudging admiration. In his journals, Morin 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 is comfortable with the context ol justification, not the con­
text of discovery (Montuori, 2006). Social scientists present themselves by pro­
posing a position, backed up with empirical data and/or a theoretical frame­
work. We are never privy to the actual process of inquiry itself, to the ups and
downs ol the research, the blind alleys, the mistakes, the insights, dialogues,
and the creative process, unless we read popular (auto-) biographies. In Journal
d'un Livre (Morin, 1994a), the journal Morin kept while writing Pour Sortir du
XX siecle. and earlier in Le Vi/ du Sujet, we lincl remarkable insights into the cre­
ative process and the life of a thinker, struggling to fight off the tendency for
dispersion, to do, read, experience too much, and lose direction in the process.
And yet the very dispersion, although painful for the author, is one ol the things
that makes Morin such a unique 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.
Foreword xxi

Along with the deeply personal, Morin also dived into the profoundly pub­
lic, through his closely followed public pronouncements on a variety of issues,
whether his impassioned rejection of the Algerian war (Le Sueur, 2003), the
events ol 1068 in Paris (Morin, Lefort, Sr Castoriadis, 1968), his advocacy for
Turkey's entry into the EU, or, more recently, his writings on the Israel-Palestine
question and his role in French environmentalism. A few weeks after the elec­
tion of Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007, Morin was invited to discuss France's environ­
mental policy with him. Morin is without question part of that dying breed, the
public intellectual. His recent critique of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians
have led to several court cases triggered by lurid accusations of anti-semitism,
and an eventual exoneration. In 2006, this led to the publication of Lr mondc
moderns el In question juivc |The modern world and the Jewish question), in
which, among other things, he stresses the importance of differentiating
between anti-semitism and critiques ol the Israeli government's policies toward
Palestinians tMorin. 2006b). At 86. Morin is still very much a public intellec­
tual, 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 also being a member ol the French president's prestigious
committee on ecology.

Complexity

Morin's vital involvement in intellectual lite has also occurred through a series
ol major conferences and dialogues with scientists, artists, and philosophers.
Most notable perhaps is the conference documented in the three volume LUnite
dc I'hommc |Human Unity] (Morin Piattelli Palmarini, 1978), a multidiscipli-
nary dialogue among primatologists, biologists, neuroscientists, anthropolo­
gists, cyberneticists, sociologists, and a variety of other natural and social scien­
tists. This extremely rich series ol dialogues, orchestrated by Morin and the
Italian cognitive scientist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, represents an important
step toward Morin's transdisciplinary approach. It goes beyond interdisciplinar-
ity, which involves using the methods of one discipline to inform another, to
draw on multiple disciplines while actually challenging the disciplinary organi­
zation of knowledge, and the reductive/disjunctive way ol thinking that makes
up what Morin was to call the "paradigm of simplicity." Transdisciplinarity aims
for a different way of thinking, and a different way of organizing knowledge.
Several of Morin's books find him in dialogues with social and natural scientists,
from astrophysicists to biologists to sociologists and philosophers. To give an
idea of the breadth involved, Morin is featured prominently in books on the
implications of the work of Uya Prigogine (Spire, 1999); in a volume on com­
plexity theory with Francisco Varela, Brian Goodwin, Stuart Kaullman and
Prigogine, among others (Benkirane, 2006); debates with Rene Thorn and
Michel Serres (Morin, 1983); in a dialogue on memory and responsibility with
xxii Foreword

Emmanuel Levinas (de Saint Cheron, 2000); in dialogue with astrophysicists

Michel Casse (Casse & Morin, 2003) and Hubert Reeves (Morin & Le Moigne,
1999); and most recently ecologist Michel Hulot (Morin &r Hulot, 2007). 1 men­
tion this in particular because of the recent perception in the United States that
French intellectual "impostors" have misappropriated and misrepresented sci­
ence. In Morin's case, this is certainly not true. In fact, we find that he actually
contributes to the articulation of the implications of the new sciences for scien­
tists themselves (Roux-Rouquie, 2002; Westbroek, 2004). The proceedings of
the prestigious Colloque de Cerisy, which 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, Le Moigne, & Proulx, 1990). His edited book on education, Rclier
les connaissances [Reconnecting Knowledges] (Morin, 1999b), includes an essay
by Paul Ricoeur among others.
Le Paradigme Perdu [Paradigm Lost], published in 1973, represents the first
step toward the integration that was later to culminate in the multivolume
Method. For Morin, healing the split between the natural and social sciences
was essential. His multidimensional approach to human nature—and to
inquiry in general—could not abide with 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 any­
thing 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 points out, Le Paradigme
Perdu was written before sociobiology and evolutionary psychology became
trendy, but it deserves to be read not just out of respect and historical interest
for a book that was ahead of its time, but because Morin outlined an important
agenda and way of thinking about the issues that is still extremely fruitful
(Dortier, 2006). And this is in many ways Morin's central contribution—to
point out that there are human problems, such as the human/nature or two-cul­
ture 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 con­
nects, 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, 2006a), Morin tackles this "en-cyclo-pedic" task by
literally circulating knowledge between the disciplines and opening up a new
way of approaching inquiry and knowledge. Around the time Le Paradigme
Perdu was being written, and until quite recently, postmodern thinkers like
Lyotard, Habermas, and others were highly critical of the integration of natural
and social sciences and against systems theoretical approaches in particular
Foreword xxiii

(Lyotard, 1984). Lechte's (1994): summary of Lyotard's position is typical of the

way systems theoretical approaches are summarily dealt with in much post­
modern discourse:

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 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 he refused to be limited by ideological boundaries. In the
process he developed his own complex interpretation of systems theory, infor­
mation 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. Ironically, Method begins with an
extensive discussion of the relationship between order and disorder, the key
role of emergence, unpredictability, and uncertainty in his approach to com­
plexity, and the importance of the prefix "re-" as in re-organization, re-thinking,
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 not be reduced to some simple category (sys­
tems theorist, structuralist, post-modernist, post-structuralist) has led to any
number of misinformed assessments of his work, particularly because until
recently 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 6-volume Method is Morin's magnum opus, a remarkable and seeming­
ly inexhaustible treasure trove of insights, reflection, and a real manual for
those who are interested in broadening the nature of human inquiry. Method
integrates the rich and diverse 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 a way of approaching inquiry that
does not reduce or separate, and does justice to the complexity of life and expe­
rience. In his sociopolitical works, such as his prescient studies on the USSR
and totalitarianism, on the nature and concept of Europe, and his "manifesto
for the 21st century," Homeland Earth {Morin &r Kern, 1999), Morin applied
this method to the planetary crisis in what he calls this "planetary iron age."
Most recently, Morin has produced, in some cases at the request of
UNESCO and the French government, a series of books and conferences
addressing the application of complex thought in educational contexts (Morin,
2001b). This is part of his ongoing quest to address the crucial issue of prepar-
xxiv Foreword

ing human beings to tackle the challenge of complexity. It is a particularly

tough challenge because the level Morin is addressing is largely invisible pre­
cisely because it does address only the content of our thoughts as much as the
organization of our thinking through, for instance, a disjunctive logic that cre­
ates binary oppositions, and therefore organizes our thinking in such a way that
we approach the world with an organizing framework of either/or. Rather than
focus exclusively on challenging binary oppositions, Morin digs deep to exca­
vate the underlying paradigm that generates those oppositions, and articulates
a generative paradigm of complexity that offers a different point of departure.
Interestingly, Morin's work on education has found particular resonance in
Latin America (particularly Brazil and Colombia), Italy, and Spain.
In over 50 years of writing and passionate participation in French,
European, and planetary culture, Morin has shown us the way toward a rich­
er, deeper appreciation of and participation in life. Our present way of think­
ing, feeling, and being, Morin proposes, is deeply problematic: It reduces, sep­
arates, and opposes. Morin points us beyond this way of thinking and toward
a paradigm of complexity: toward a way of thinking and being that does not
mutilate life, but allows us to live it more fully by being more present to the
complexities, paradoxes, tragedies, joys, failures, and successes. He points us
toward a way of thinking that is not disembodied and abstract, but rich in feel­
ing, intuition, and connection to the larger social and historical context. A
thought that is holographic and contextual, showing us how we are embedded
in time and space. But a thought that is also transformative, self-eco-re-organ-
izing, by including all of who we are and indeed stretching our understanding
of who we are and pointing us toward new possibilities.
Morin's work has gradually led to the development of a transdisciplinary
approach to inquiry Going beyond the fragmentation and hyper-specialization
too often promoted in academia, Morin has approached a variety of subjects
normally confined in isolated disciplines and brought to them his own complex
sensibility, while at the same time, in the process of immersing himself in his
inquiry, he has been able to draw from the subjects a further stimulus and
impetus for his own conception of transdisciplinary inquiry. It is this kind of
generative loop that is one of the trademarks of Morin's complex thought and
his complex practice of inquiry It is to be hoped that in the coming years,
Morin's work will receive the long overdue attention it deserves in the English-
speaking world, and assist us in the challenge of living in an ever-increasingly
complex, uncertain, and ambiguous world.