Edgar Morin turns 100

Abstract

At the frontiers of sciences, technologies and religions, a model of a complex universe is taking shape. This model presupposes a multiple, contradictory-complementary, dancing and flowing reality, a Heraclitian nature. But who can be sure that it is still so in depth? Is the deepest root of the Real multiple and complex? Is the Realin- itself multiple and complex? Were Parmenides and the Upanishads wrong? On the occasion of the centenary of Edgar Morin’s birth, we recall that his writings are today providing a masterly description of what the Hindu tradition of Advaita Vedanta calls Maya, the Great Cosmic Illusion. But the Real, the Simple, remains hidden behind the veil. One of the outstanding currents of contemporary thought has led, along the lines of Bergson, Whitehead and Teilhard de Chardin himself, to the overcoming of the reductionist rationalism of the Cartesian tradition by a new holistic paradigm, to which Edgar Morin has contributed from the systemic approach of complexity.