On Complexity

Edgar Morin is highly underrated in the western world. Anyone with an interest in complexity, systems thinking, or transdisciplinary practice should know his work.

He helps us move beyond both reduction and holism and the flattening that comes with either. Complex thought refuses the either/or, embracing both/and. It rejects cultures of disjunction, replacing them with conjunction and distinction: understanding how things come together without losing their identities.

Three principles show us what it actually means to understand a connected world:

Dialogic: what appears opposed is in fact complementary and antagonistic at once — order and disorder, for instance, require each other.

Recursive: causality that loops. Processes are both producers and effects of themselves. Individuals make culture; culture makes individuals.

Holographic: the part is in the whole, and the whole is in the part. What we learn about the part changes what we know about the whole, and vice versa.