Dies at the age of 104 the sociologist and philosopher Edgar Morin

The French philosopher and sociologist Edgar Morin died this Friday in Paris at the age of 104. Father of the theory of complex thought, Morin dedicated a large part of his career to questioning the fragmentation of knowledge and proposing a perspective that relates science, philosophy, history, and culture to explain reality from multiple dimensions.

Recognized as one of the most important intellectual figures of the 20th and 21st centuries, his theory has influenced generations of researchers and educators worldwide. His first work appeared in 1946, L'An zéro de l'Allemagne, and decades later his concept of complex thought was consolidated. The thinker argued that the major contemporary problems cannot be understood from a single discipline.

Morin defended the idea of permanent change, of rectification, of evolution: "The human being is neither good nor bad, it is complex and versatile." And he warned: "Our minds are possessed by myths, religions, and ideologies".

Born in 1921, son of secularized Sephardic Jews, as a child he adopted the French identity without renouncing the old Spanish spoken in his home. For years he also wanted to feel European, a faith he eventually lost. At 10 years old he had been orphaned of his mother. He wrote dozens of books and received 38 honorary doctorates honoris causa.

He was a friend of Marguerite Duras, he lived the liberation of Paris in 1944 and the Carnation Revolution in Lisbon in 1974, and he often traveled to Moscow between 1989 and 1991 during the perestroika and glasnost. Passion and reason were the driving forces, in tension, that moved him.

Morin maintained his lucidity until the end, still intervening publicly in the most current debates. In a long interview published a few weeks ago in Le Monde, he showed himself worried “about the neo-authoritarian regression that is spreading throughout the world” and which favors “one of the two Frances: the one that was for a long time monarchical, aristocratic and religious, a Pétainist France, as opposed to the republican, secular and social one”. All this in “a catastrophic process underway. And although Trump and Netanyahu are not eternal, right now there is no option for salvation. We cannot raise any testimony other than that of impotence. The only hope is the improbable. Let's resist”.