Obituary for the Complexity Scientist Edgar Morin

On 29 May 2026, Edgar Morin passed away in Paris at an advanced age, just short of his 105th birthday. He was born Edgar Nahoum on 8 July 1921 in Paris, the son of secular Jewish immigrants from Thessaloniki, and himself lived a complex biography: a fighter in the Résistance, a member of the Communist Party until 1951, then expelled from the party and a lifelong dissident vis-à-vis any orthodoxy. At the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), which he joined in 1950 and where he became research director, he worked at the intersection of sociology, philosophy, ethnography and biology. He received honorary doctorates from 38 universities worldwide.

Morin’s intellectual life’s work is concentrated in the six-volume La Méthode (1977–2004), whose first volume, La nature de la nature, sets out the programme: order, disorder and organisation are not to be conceived as opposites but as inseparably interwoven dimensions of reality. In critical engagement with Ludwig von Bertalan_y’s general systems theory, Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics and Claude Shannon’s information theory, Morin developed an independent position. He adopted the concept of the open system, but radicalised it: no system, he argued, is completely open, and none is completely closed. Every system requires openness towards its environment and closure for selfpreservation – a tension he does not resolve but understands as constitutive of all systems. The core concept is complexity – and Morin emphasised that complexus in Latin means “woven together”. Complexity is for him not a property of di_icult subject matters but an epistemic attitude: the attempt to deal with the interplay of part and whole, subject and object, order and perturbation, not through reduction but through a form of thinking capable of withstanding the tension between these poles.
One of the basic assumptions of systemic perspectives is well known: one cannot intervene in living complex systems in a directive-instructional manner; they can only change through self organisation. Living complex systems include families, couples, groups, but also, for example, the brain, the climate or the human being as a complex biopsychosocial system – Morin referred to these as hypercomplex machines. One of his particular achievements was to develop complexity-scientific and interdisciplinary
reflections on the structure and dynamics of such systems (above all in his major work La nature de la nature). For Morin, the “driving forces” of self-organised processes of change in living, complex systems are disorder, “noise” and error/mistake (Morin, 1974, pp. 137f.), whereby by disorder he means all internal and external “perturbations” of the system’s existing organisational schemata, and by error/mistake everything the system produces that does not correspond to a previously defined intention.
A further important element of these considerations is what he formulated as the “law of systemic antagonism” (Morin, 1981, p. 119), which posits polarities and ambivalences as central to the dynamics of living, complex systems. He marks as immanent to the system, and as stimulating change, both the antagonistic relations among the components and elements of a system and the system’s constant confrontation with contradictions from
the environment – that is, with alternatives that contain equally desirable or equally repellent possibilities (Morin, 1974, p. 138).
This “law” aptly explains why systemic practitioners are so fond of ambivalences: they require the tension associated with ambivalences, antagonisms and polarities as the
“fuel” for self-organised processes of change. This “law” also helps explain why antagonisms and oppositions appear constitutive for the maintenance of systems. Systemic thinking in Morin’s sense therefore means always “co-thinking” the counterpole to one’s own position as constitutive of the system and, in this sense, according it
recognition – and this applies to the micro-, meso- and macro-levels of living complex systems, such as cellular metabolism, families or society. It also protects against naïve
and undercomplex interventions at all of these levels and instead invites us not to adopta one-sided position, but always to include the antagonistic element in our perspective in order to arrive at a reflective understanding of dynamics and structures that meets the demands of systems and complexity theory.
With Edgar Morin, the intellectual world loses one of the last thinkers of the 20th century who sought to counteract the fragmentation of scientific knowledge into countless individual disciplines with a passionate plea for complexity and transdisciplinarity.
Tom Levold and Matthias Ochs
References:
Morin, E. (1974). Das Rätsel des Humanen. Grundfragen einer neuen Anthropologie.
München/Zürich: Piper.
Morin, E. (1981). Method. Towards a study of humankind. Vol. 1: The nature of nature. New
York: Peter Lang.