Edgar Morin
Edgar Morin is a French philosopher and sociologist of the theory of information who has been recognized for his work on complexity and "complex thought", and for his scholarly contributions to such diverse fields as media studies, politics, sociology, visual anthropology, ecology, education, and systems biology. He holds two bachelors, one in history and geography and one in law, and never did a Ph.D. Though less well known in the anglophone world due to the limited availability of English translations of his over 60 books, Morin is renowned in the French-speaking world, Europe, and Latin America.
During his academic career, he was primarily associated with the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris.
Biography
Edgar was born on July 8, 1921 as Edgar Nahoum, to Vidal Nahoum and Louna Beressi. They were Greek Jews from Salonica of distant Italian ancestry. They moved to Marseille and later to Paris. While he is of Sephardic Jewish origin, his family was secular and non-practicing for three generations. His mother died when he was ten years old.In 1936, during the Spanish Civil War, Morin joined the libertarian socialist organization Solidarité Internationale Antifasciste. Two years later, he joined the pacifist anti-fascist, left-wing Parti Frontiste. When the Nazi Germans invaded France in 1940, Morin assisted refugees and joined the French Resistance. He left Paris to the "free zone" Toulouse, where he continued to study law at the Toulouse Capitole University. He joined the French Communist Party in 1941. He then joined Michel Cailliau's MRPGD, which was a resistance movement against the German occupation of France. As a member of the French Resistance, he adopted the pseudonym Morin after a miscommunication during a meeting of resistance fighters in Toulouse, when he introduced himself Edgar Manin, in reference to Malraux's character in La Condition humaine. They misheard him as "Morin," and the name stuck.
The MRPGD later merged into François Mitterrand's MNPGD. Morin later became attaché to the staff of the 1st French Army in Germany, then head of the "Propaganda" office in the French Military Government. At the Liberation, he wrote L'An zéro de l'Allemagne, in which he described the mental state of the defeated people of Germany as being in a state of "somnambulism", in the grip of a "state of depression," hunger, and rumors.
In 1945, Morin married Irène "Violette" Chapellaubeau and they lived in Landau, where he served as a lieutenant in the French Occupation army in Germany. The couple had two children, sociologist Irène Nahoum-Léothaud and anthropologist Véronique Nahoum-Grappe.
In 1946, he returned to Paris and gave up his military career to pursue his activities with the Communist Party. In 1948 and 1949, he wrote for the arts and entertainment section of the Patriote Résistant. Other literary contributions in this year include the Communist Party leader Maurice Thorez inviting him to write for the weekly Les Lettres Françaises, and Morin connecting the philosopher Martin Heidegger with the journal Fontaine to write a review. Due to his critical posture, his relationship with the party gradually deteriorated until he was expelled in 1951 after he published an article in L'Observateur politique, économique et littéraire. In the same year, he was admitted to the National Center of Scientific Research with the support of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Vladimir Jankélévitch.
In 1955, Morin was one of the four leaders of the Comité contre la guerre d'Algérie and he defended Algerian politician Messali Hadj. Unlike Jean-Paul Sartre, André Breton, Guy Debord and his friends Marguerite Duras and Dionys Mascolo, he did not sign the Declaration on the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian War, known as the "Manifesto of 121", published in September 1960 in the journal Vérité-Liberté. Believing that the urgent need was to avoid the installation of dictatorships in France and Algeria, he joined Claude Lefort, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Roland Barthes in instead calling for urgent negotiations. In 1954, Morin co-founded and directed the magazine , which ran until 1962.
In 1959 his book Autocritique was published. The book was a sustained reflection on his adherence to, and subsequent exit from, the Communist Party, focusing on the dangers of ideology and self-deception.
In 1960, Morin travelled extensively in Latin America, visiting Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Peru and Mexico. He returned to France, where he published L'Esprit du Temps, a work on popular culture. That same year, French sociologist Georges Friedmann brought him and Roland Barthes together to create a Centre for the Study of Mass Communication that, after several name changes, became the Edgar Morin Centre of the EHESS, Paris. Also in 1960 Morin and Jean Rouch coauthored the film Chronique d'un été, an early example of cinéma vérité and direct cinema.
Beginning in 1965, Morin became involved in a large multidisciplinary project, financed by the Délégation Générale à la Recherche Scientifique et Technologique in Plozévet. This project culminated in La Métamorphose de Plodémet, which was an ethnology of contemporary French society about the commune of Plozévet, where he stayed for almost a year. In 1968, Morin became the center of a controversy after the publication of his study, as local inhabitants felt betrayed by his work and denounced inaccuracies that he published. Morin attempted to clarify his intentions and answered critics on the Canadian television show Le Sel de la semaine, and it was agreed that the inhabitants misinterpreted his sociological jargon, and he likewise misinterpreted their cultural references and jokes.
In 1968, Morin replaced the incumbent professor of philosophy, Henri Lefebvre, at the University of Nanterre. He became involved in the student revolts that began to emerge in France. In May 1968 he wrote a series of articles for Le Monde that tried to understand what he called "The Student Commune." He followed the student revolt closely and wrote a second series of articles in Le Monde called "The Revolution without a Face," as well as coauthoring Mai 68: La brèche with Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort.
In 1969, Morin spent a year at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California. Jonas Salk invited him under the recommendation of Jacques Monod and John Hunt, with the sole imposed condition of learning. It was there, in this "breeding ground for Nobel Prizes" that he familiarized himself with systems theory. He read Henri Laborit, James Watson, Stéphane Lupasco, Bronowski, and was introduced to the thought of Gregory Bateson and the "new problematic in ecology".
In 1970, he married Johanne Harrelle, but the relationship did not last; after their divorce in 1980, they remained friends until her death in 1994. In 1982, he married Edwige Lannegrace, who was his lifelong partner until her death in 2008.
In the 1972 international colloquium L'Unité de l'Homme, which he co-organized with Jacques Monod and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, Morin aimed to bridge different disciplinary perspectives on human nature. His communication "Le Paradigme perdu: la nature humaine," became a book the following year.
In 1983 he published De la nature de l’URSS, which deepened his analysis of Soviet communism and anticipated the perestroika of Mikhail Gorbachev.
In 2002 Morin participated in the creation of the International Ethical, Scientific and Political Collegium. Also that year, he made a trip to Iran with Dariush Shayegan. In June 2002, Morin published a widely-discussed op-ed with Sami Naïr and Danièle Sallenave in Le Monde entitled "Israël-Palestine: le cancer," where they argued that the suffering of the Jewish people had allowed Israel to become an oppressor of the Palestinian people. The authors were sued for "racial defamation and apology for terrorist acts" by France-Israël et Avocats sans frontières, but were ultimately acquitted by the court of cassation, which recognized the article as falling under the freedom of expression.
Following a meeting at a music festival in Fez, Morocco, in 2009, Morin became close with sociology professor Sabah Abouessalam. The couple married in 2012. In 2013, the couple tried to rehabilitate an ecological farm in the Marrakech region owned by his family; they were inspired by the agro-ecology of Pierre Rabhi. They also collaborated on the text, La rencontre improbable et nécessaire, and in 2020 on Changeons de voie - Les leçons du coronavirus.
In 2013, he supported Chief Raoni in his fight against the Belo Monte dam in Brazil. Raoni, intellectuals, lawyers and politicians launched a moral tribunal for crimes against nature and the future of humanity during the Rio+20 Conference. In the same year, Morin and twelve other intellectuals joined the platform published by the European citizens' initiative End ''Ecocide in Europe. In 2019, he declared in an article in Liberation.fr that money's power is at the origin of ecological degradation.
At the age of 101, Morin worked on a translation of 32 of his essays alongside sociologist Amy Heath-Carpentier in the book The Challenge of Complexity: Essays by Edgar Morin'', which included a few that were translated into English for the first time.
Polycrisis and complex thought
After leaving the Communist Party in 1951, Morin's work moved toward a new "politics of civilization," which calls for the transformation of the human species into humanity and places the solidarity between people as a fundamental goal.Edgar Morin is the originator of the concept of polycrisis, a situation where multiple crises—environmental, social, economic, and political—are interconnected and amplify one another's impacts. To address this, Morin developed a framework called complex thought that goes beyond reductionism by integrating various dimensions of reality.