Edgar Morin's 100th Birthday - Lessons from a Century of Life
French sociologist and philosopher Edgar Morin is about to celebrate his 100th birthday. On this occasion, he is publishing his testamentary work, Lessons from a Century of Life.
This is sufficiently singular to be underlined and commented on. All the more so since the "planetary humanist" according to UNESCO, has kept a freshness of mind to think about the contemporary world and teach how to live, without being a giver of lessons.
He wrote a lot. How can we approach his work? His more than 70 works can be classified into a few broad categories: the reform of thought; complex thought in a systemic approach; the human condition with a reflection on culture, art and cinema; education with The Seven Necessary Knowledges for the Education of the Future; ecology, including La Terre-Patrie and Écologiser l'homme; political thought; reflections on his career as an intellectual; autobiographical works.
What lessons can be learned from what matters to him? The important thing is to live the human adventure with risks, while maintaining the activity of one's mind in contact with the world in permanent movement. In 1943, in the middle of the war, he joined the resistance, he was 22 years old. Edgar Morin speaks today of the fraternity of the Resistance as being among the most beautiful moments of his life: the fraternity experienced in oases linked together as so many places of resistance and cultivation of a complex thought. For Edgar Morin, we must today respond to the duty of "inscribing ourselves in the local adventures of the oases, rearguards of humanity in triumphant barbarities, vanguards of humanity if the possibility of a better future is glimpsed" (Edgar Morin, La Fraternité, pourquoi? )
At the end of the war, he was enlightened by communist ideology with the excesses that made him believe that the end could justify the means, and that loyalty to the Party was worth more than freedom of conscience and expression. But four years later, he became disillusioned. He then took the profound accuracy of humanists like Camus. This episode made Edgar Morin say that today, "beautiful souls and big hearts are the most important thing there is, the best thing in the world."
For Edgar Morin, the purpose of thought is to help us hold on to contradiction. Not to seek to make a synthesis to resolve oppositions (dialectic), but to live in the unity of opposites, by making them dialogue (dialogic). This is how we find the path to wisdom, for example, by living passion and reason simultaneously, "passion regulated by reason, and reason nourished by passion".
At 100 years old, Edgar Morin remains animated by the forces of life, because they allow, he says, to repress the anxieties of death. We must be amazed, before the spectacle of life, before its mystery. Writing and reading, poetry, help to live, and also love.
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