Edgar Morin, one of the most influential intellectuals of the 20th century, dies at 104 years old

Barcelona"We can raise no other witness than that of powerlessness. The only hope is the improbable. We must resist," the philosopher and sociologist Edgar Morin declared less than two months ago in a long interview in Le Monde, the last of the public appearances he was able to make before his death, in Paris, at the age of 104, after a prolific and highly recognized career spanning eight decades. Morin lamented "the catastrophic process underway" caused by actions such as those of "Trump and Netanyahu." Despite his concern "about the neo-authoritarian regression spreading throughout the world," the thinker — one of the most influential intellectuals of the 20th century and the first quarter of the 21st century — stated that he continued to "believe in humanity despite doubting it" and called for the urgent activation of "a conscious regenerationism of the identity of origin and the shared destiny of all humans.

Father of the theory of complex thought, Edgar Morin dedicated a large part of his career to questioning the fragmentation of knowledge and proposing an integrative perspective that related science, philosophy, history, and culture to explain reality from multiple dimensions. "The awareness of complexity makes us understand that we will never escape uncertainty," he stated in one of the more than 60 books he published,

Introduction to Complex Thought (1990, in Spanish by Gedisa).

From the Second World War to the creation of the 'method'

Born on July 8, 1921, in Paris, with the name Edgar Nahoum, son of secularized Jews from Thessaloniki, he adopted the French identity in his childhood without renouncing the old Castilian spoken at home. It was during World War II that Nahoum, who actively participated in the French Resistance while earning degrees in geography and history and later in law, adopted the pseudonym Morin based on the distortion of the surname of one of the characters in "La condition humaine" by André Malraux. The author kept the pseudonym from the publication of his first work, L'an zéro de l'Allemagne ("The Year Zero of Germany," 1946), in which he describes the state of the country in the months following the end of World War II.

Morin then became interested in studying the representation of death in various cultures, which led to "El hombre y la muerte" (1948, in Spanish by Kairós), and immediately after, while already part of the prestigious National Center for Scientific Research, he delved into one of his passions, cinema, in "El cine o el hombre imaginario" (1956, in Spanish by Paidós), before becoming interested in mass culture in "L'esprit du temps" (The Spirit of the Times, 1962) and also in the on-the-spot analysis of the May 1968 revolts, in a volume like "Mai 68" (1968), co-authored with Claude Lefort and Cornelius Castoriadis.

It was in the 1970s, after passing through the French Communist Party (1941-1952), having led the committee against the Algerian war (1954-1962), and having traveled on numerous occasions to Latin America throughout the 1960s, that Morin began to work on his most ambitious project, "El mètode" (The Method), a sextet of essays published in French between 1977 and 2004 (in Spanish by Cátedra). It is in these books that Morin puts into practice the theory of complex thought, based on the interconnection and interdependence of disciplines such as biology, culture, and history, to grasp the human being in his totality. For Morin, knowledge is always partial and subject to revision, life is born from the interaction between stability and change, and reality is a mixture of order and chaos that must be interpreted from multiple perspectives.

An intellectual interested in everything

"Human beings are neither good nor bad, they are complex and versatile", the sociologist and philosopher recalled years later in one of his autobiographical books, My Demons (1994, in Catalan by Proa). In parallel with the development of complex thought, Morin was becoming one of the most recognized French intellectuals with a growing international reach. Translated into almost thirty languages, Morin was interested, among many other issues, in Soviet totalitarianism (What is Totalitarianism?, 1983, in Spanish by Anthropos), in the challenges of the European continent (Thinking Europe, 1987, in Catalan by Edicions 62, and Culture and Barbarism of Europe, 2005, in Catalan by Pagès editors), in the Balkan wars (The Fratricides, 1995), in the place of Judaism in contemporary times (The Modern World and the Jewish Question, 2006) and in environmentalism (The First Year of the Ecological Era, 2007, in Spanish by Paidós).

Like sociologists such as Alain Touraine and anthropologists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Edgar Morin has remained very active until the end of his long life. In this last decade alone, he has published about twenty books, including the memoirs Lessons from a Century of Life (2021, in Spanish by Paidós), the essay Lessons from History (2025, in Catalan by Pòrtic) and the manifesto Let's Wake Up! (2022, in Catalan by Afers), where he called to win a future of tolerance and hospitality. In this short text, which had a notable impact in France, Morin contrasted "a humanist policy" with the "calm inhumanity" that let people die at sea, or in wars such as those in Ukraine and Gaza; the same inhumanity that, in its extreme stance, is based on the "perversion" of an "ethnic and religious purification deeply rooted in European history": Europe of religious sectarianism, of the subjugation and elimination of national or cultural differences, of the supremacist atrocities of the colonial empires.

The most recent message he left, from an interview in Le Monde, was more pessimistic than in Let's Wake Up!, (2025, in Catalan at Pòrtic) and the manifesto