In moments of polarization, an entire nation can be subjected to a deeply negative perception, one that may lead to—or be accompanied by—atrocities against its people. Edgar Morin understood this well. He refused to reduce post-WWII Germans to the actions of the Nazis, just as he refused to reduce any individual or group to their worst characteristics or deeds.
Such a stance was not tolerated by the Communist Party, which ultimately expelled Morin for his views. For him, complexifying issues—whether in global politics or atomic structures—was the essential lens through which to understand the world.
Among the many issues Morin engaged with, complexity stood as the central one. He explored it from multiple angles, one of which was fostering multidisciplinary dialogue across scientific domains. Morin advocated for collaboration among primatologists, biologists, neuroscientists, anthropologists, cyberneticists, sociologists, and various other natural and social scientists.
To put this into practice, he organized a conference, later documented in his three-volume work L’Unité de l’Homme (1978), where scholars from all these fields engaged in a groundbreaking exchange.
These glimpses trace Edgar Morin’s journey through life and philosophy. In this article, I summarize key ideas from The Challenge of Complexity—a collection of Morin’s essays translated into English, and one of his few works available to English-language readers.
Complexity and Science
For Morin, complexity means expanding an issue across the domains of knowledge and academia. To him, knowledge is constructed through diverse disciplines and perspectives; it can never be reduced to the confines of a single field.
Morin described himself as an example of a marginal author. He emphasizes this as an issue facing the world – how we don’t focus on complexity, since only authors like him deal with complexity. He sees simplistic explanations as a crisis for the sciences. What used to be a problem only for human sciences – like uncertainty and contradiction – now represents a problem for scientific knowledge too.
Morin was an early critic of the disconnect between scientific fields, especially when viewed in the broader context of scientific progress. It is well known that chemistry and physics overlap so extensively that their boundaries often blur. Similarly, biology and chemistry are deeply intertwined—after all, aren’t all living organisms composed of chemical substances? Countless chemical reactions govern everything in the body, from cellular processes to digestion and even thought processes. Yet despite these deep interconnections, the disciplines remain rigidly separated. Even psychology—at least in some of its subfields—upholds theories that directly contradict established biological principles. Worse still, different branches within the same field often operate in isolation, with little to no collaboration. When they do interact, it’s frequently only to highlight opposing viewpoints rather than seek common ground.
Morin views concepts such reduction as fundamental issues that lead to the rejection of complexity in modern science. Reductionism, the belief that understanding the parts alone can fully explain the whole, inherently dismisses complexity. Similarly, the principle of disjunction – which seeks to isolate questions from each other in scientific research – has lead to rigid boundaries among scientific disciplines.
Complexity cannot even be visible from when viewed through the fragmented lens of disciplinary divisions. The term itself – derived from the Latin complexus, meaning “woven together” – hints at its essence. Perhaps this is why studies on complexity remain relatively rare, even when considering the “restricted complexity” view. As Morin argues, disciplines like cybernetics and complex systems theory can only address complexity in a restricted sense, never general complexity.
Despite the fact that any attempt to study complexity can restrict it, Morin promotes the wider cross-disciplinary views of fields such as cybernetics or complex systems. Cybernetics, particularly some of its concepts such as feedback in control systems, can highlight the relationship between disciplines where facts from fields can feed into each other. This aligns with Morin’s emphasis on the original conception of “encyclopedia” (from Greek enkyklios paideia, “circular education”), which envisioned knowledge as an interconnected, circulating system rather than compartmentalized domains.
Morin integrates information theory’s concepts of entropy and negentropy as primary forces shaping systems toward what he identifies as the two fundamental modes of behavior: organization and disorganization. Disorganization manifests through various states – dispersion, disorder, disintegration – observable across all systemic scales from cosmological to biological.
Increased entropy specifically produces both greater disorder and heightened homogeneity within a system’s components, reducing their heterogeneity. A biological example of such disorganization appears in mutations where genetic information errors occur during information transmission.
Morin further demonstrates that logic cannot fully encompass complexity; since human logic itself is limited, complexity must not be constrained by it. As a result the way complexity may manifest itself to the observer could be in a form of “obscurity, doubts, ambiguity, or even paradox or contradiction” as Morin explains.
Complex Thoughts
Morin’s concept of complexity can transform the way we think. Complex thoughts differ fundamentally from simple thoughts. While simple thought ‘requires us to dissociate and reduce,’ the paradigm of complexity demands that we ‘connect as well as to distinguish’. Complex thoughts acknowledge interconnectedness, context, uncertainty, and the role of the inquirer. While it seems as though a wider view of cybernetics or complex systems can represent complex thoughts, but the concept is beyond what is being represented; it is about embracing uncertainty and incompleteness rather than certainty and wholeness.
According to Morin, complex thought should form an approach to thinking—but no single thought can fully embody his definition of complexity, particularly when considering thoughts as scientific or philosophical concepts: “Complex thought cannot, nor does it want to be 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.”. Morin’s complex thought is not necessarily more scientific or more rational. He describes it: “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”.
Despite his focus on cybernetics and similar fields to approach science in a complex way, Morin views all mathematical approaches to complexity as representing only ‘restricted complexity.’. While “general complexity”, a concept derived from Morin’s complex thought, requires fundamental rethinking of what is knowledge and how shall we think. In Morin’s framework, both complex systems and dynamical systems represent scientific approaches that exemplify restricted complexity.
While complex thought seems like a philosophical concept, general complexity is not a mere concept, yet it lacks the required “epistemological and paradigmatic revolutions” that can shape it in a way that doesn’t make it a “pure chatter” by restricted complexity as Morin explains. General complexity, whenever it is going to be formed, epistemologically and paradigmatically, it integrates restricted complexity.
The relationship between the whole and the parts
Systems behaviour and emergent features are best understood by the main concept of systems theory “The whole is more than the sum of its parts”. Complexity requires understanding the relationship between the whole and the parts. The knowledge of either side in separation isn’t enough. Morin says: “The whole is not only more than the sum of its parts, but it is also less than the sum of its parts”. Also, the circular relationship between the whole and the part and their interactions results into a feedback that adds more complexity to understanding the nature of a system “Feedback is already a complex concept, even in non-living systems. Negative feed-back makes it possible to cancel the deviations that form unceasingly, like a fall in temperature compared to a standard.”
One example of a complex relationship between the parts and the whole in biology is the cellular death. If death of the cells (the parts) is obstructed, it can result into cancer and hence death of the individual (the whole). Another historical example is the Russian Revolution (1917) that “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” As Morin explains.