Telosaes.it

“Complexity is a challenge to knowledge, thought, action. Our reality - physical, biological and social - is an odd mix of order, disorder and organisation."

Telos: Instead of compartimentalised, simplistic knowledge, you propose complex knowledge that breaks down the traditional barriers between the disciplines and fills the black holes in our educational systems. What does teaching complexity mean?

Edgar Morin: Complexity is a challenge for knowledge, thought, action. Our reality, both physical, biological and social, is an odd mix of order, disorder and organisation.
By order I do not mean just determinism, but also stability, regularity; by disorder I do not mean just chance, but also decay, collusion; by organisation I mean all the systems on our planet that have been created, from atoms to the stars to the human species.
Knowledge - as it is taught today - is unable to convey, much less teach, complexity: either it separates data or it only sees confusion. Why does all this happen? Because knowledge is governed by the paradigm of disconnection, i.e. we want to understand a complex whole starting with its basic elements, separated from their environment and from the groups they are part of. For example, sociology does not take into account the individual, psychology does not take into account society, the dominant economy only takes into account information through calculations: growth, GDP, opinion polls, etc. But these calculations eliminate the flesh and only see a skeleton.
So they end up separating the cultural man from the biological man and impose a techno-economic vision that not only thinks it knows just through numbers, but dreams of the total algorithmisation of society and man. Algorithms allow us to predict the actions of a simple machine, one whose behaviour we can foresee as soon as we are informed of its programming criteria. Unfortunately, man, by his very nature, is not a simple machine, let alone predictable. The evolution of life is the fruit of metamorphosis, our life is made of a series of unexpected events, revelations and encounters that transform us.
This simplistic vision of man, society, life, is the source of the errors and illusions that have proliferated and are still proliferating.
It is this way of thinking, which separates and disconnects, that I contrast with complex knowledge, according to Pascal’s principle that “Since all things being caused and causing, assisted and assisting, mediate and immediate, and all of them joined by an intangible natural bond that connects the most distant and the most variant, I hold it impossible to know the parts without knowing the whole, or to know the whole without individually knowing the parts.”
This principle of Pascal was long ignored because we lived according to the Cartesian principles of dividing and separating to acquire knowledge. Cartesian principles were useful in the specialisation of knowledge, but prevented any overall vision, any global vision, any complex vision.

How does the theme of the ‘seven lessons’ fit into your vision?

All the sciences include, and are scattered with, elements that regard man and what is human, and for this reason, all the sciences, including philosophy, must be connected.
This is the reason why I argue that you can teach complexity: it is essential to train the mind to put all information and factual knowledge into context, to be able to integrate knowledge into the system you find yourself in and take part in.
So, methods need to be taught that enable the understanding of mutual relations and how the parts and the whole influence each other in a complex world. Minds that are eager to know always come up against ambivalence and contradiction.
True knowledge does not refuse them, because this would reduce and simplify, it faces them. We need to teach people to think that antagonisms can be complementary.
The fact that you have referred to one of my books, published by UNESCO in 1999, Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future, makes me very happy. In the book, I talk in particular about teaching the ethics for human genre, about human understanding, about facing uncertainties and about earth identity. Teaching the seven lessons allows both teachers and students to acquire a culture, i.e. something that goes beyond speciality. It is essential for literature and philosophy scholars to draw upon the tremendous achievements in the sciences, and likewise the sciences must reflect on their social and cultural implications. I would add that literature and poetry are not just things that give us wonderful feelings. They teach us what it means to be human, they teach us life. These are fundamental achievements. Therefore, anything that tends to reduce the human sciences to purely technical and specialised knowledge could be called barbaric. The key point of the teaching of the seven lessons is the human condition. Nowhere is it taught what we humans are. This is a huge black hole in our educational systems. In education, various disciplines have disintegrated the complex unity of human nature. Part of teaching complexity is restoring the unity of human nature so that everyone becomes aware and conscious both of their complex identity and of their common identity with all other humans.

You often talk about the need for a ‘dialogue among civilisations.’ What do you mean? And what does this concept of ‘civilisation’ mean, especially in relation to the concept of ‘culture’?

According to the classic distinction proposed in 19th century German sociology, we call culture whatever belongs to an ethnic group, a nation or community. In other words, its customs, beliefs, rituals, celebrations, gods and myths… While civilisation is whatever can be transmitted from one culture to another. For example, potato cultivation was transmitted from Andean America to Europe, then to the rest of the world. Like the plough started to be used in a corner of the world and then spread everywhere.
In other words, civilisation is technical and material: it is what can be transmitted. So, when we talk about a “dialogue between civilisations”, we mean a “dialogue between cultures”. When we talk about dialogue between civilisations in its current meaning, we think of Western civilisation, or Chinese, Islamic, Christian, Iranian, African and so on. Yet if I talk about Chinese civilisation, I could be talking about the Tao or Confucianism, and Islamic civilisation, for example, includes countries and populations that have different cultures. Basically, civilisation and culture are vague concepts and subject to uncertainty! However, we could remedy this uncertainly by saying that “We are different, we have different beliefs and religions, but our particular characteristics should not prevent us from dialoguing.” In my view, civilisations or cultures do not dialogue. Only individuals can dialogue, and there is only dialogue when each individual can express their thesis, produce their arguments and the other is not prevented from doing so.
Real dialogue is when you recognise the same dignity in others: no dialogue is possible between a master and his slave. It implies equality, which is a relatively new point of view in European culture! Western Europe has dominated and exploited the world starting with the conquering of America; it trafficked in slaves and practiced slavery; it perpetuated the longest and harshest dominations in history. Yet in that same Europe, and perhaps even since that conquest, illuminated minds have developed some key ideas that enable dialogue: it was Bartolomeo de Las Casa, a Spanish priest, who said that the American indigenous people were human beings just like everyone else. And it was Montaigne who wrote that “Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice; for indeed it seems we have no other test of truth and reason that the example and pattern of the opinions and customs of the country we live in. There is always the perfect religion, the perfect government, the perfect and accomplished manners in all things.”
Montesquieu continued by imagining, in his epistolary novel Persian Letters, some Persian travellers who arrive in France and look at it as an anthropologist would. In other words, Western Europe is both the land of domination and of ideas about emancipation.

What is the difference between dialogue and negotiation?

Negotiating means contracting to reach an agreement. While genuine dialogue lies in understanding others.
To understand others, you first need to try and get to know them in their entirety, know their beliefs, customs, rituals, civilisation, which implies an erudition or a certain education.
We must understand that the Other is a subject like we are, an autonomous individual who deserves respect. At that point, the subjective impulse of interest and sympathy is indispensable. Without this, there is no understanding. Today we are experiencing a collective hysteria and Manichaeism that prevent solidarity and, hence, understanding.
We are going through a period when understanding is losing ground. How can we encourage greater understanding? Take France and Germany, which fought for a century and a half. In France, at school they taught that the Germans were beasts and, in Germany, that the French were useless. After World War II, they decided that the history books needed to be reviewed and that their socio-centric vision needed to be replaced with a broader point of view.
But, on the other hand, today in Western Europe, we continue to hide some parts of history when we study this continent. For example, we forget that the Ottoman Empire extended up to Hungary and the former Yugoslavia and played a civilising role for centuries. We need a historical education to sympathise with the Other. Many conditions must be met before engaging in dialogue. The first is mutual understanding.

Marco Sonsini