EDGAR MORIN: BIOGRAPHY, CONTRIBUTIONS AND WORKS - CULTURE VOCABULARY - 2025

Edgar Morin is a prestigious French sociologist, philosopher and director, whose vast literary work is widely known throughout the world. He was born in Paris, France, on July 8, 1921 with the name Edgar Nahoum.

Morín is considered one of the most emblematic thinkers of the past century and the current one for his contributions to the analysis of complex thought. His name is mandatory when referring to the paradigm shift in education and the reform of thought.

Edgar Morin, Sao Paulo, 2011. Source: commons.wikimedia.org

After the publication in 1977 of volume one of The Method, considered his most important work, the figure of Morín acquired greater relevance as it was the first scientific proposal for a new integrative paradigm to better understand physical and social reality.

His literary contributions have earned him countless academic awards around the world: honorary doctorates and distinctions from various academic and official institutions.

Morin is a "Planetary Thinker", as Alain Touraine called him, who belonged to a group of French intellectuals which included Jean Paul Sartre and the journalist François Mauriac, who opposed the war in Algeria in 1955 and formed a committee of action.

Among his most outstanding works are: Man and Death (1951), Summer Chronicle (1961), The Lost Paradigm: Human Nature (1973), Method I, II, III, IV, V and VI (1977 - 2004), Sociology (1984), My demons (1994), The seven necessary knowledge for an education of the future (2000), among many others.

His work on complexity and complex thinking is recognized worldwide, especially in Francophone countries, as well as in Europe and America. His academic contributions to sociology, visual anthropology, ecology, politics, education, and systems biology have been widely appreciated.

Likewise, he has written various essays on history, law and economics, characterized by his diligent, irreverent and audacious spirit.

Biography

Edgar Nahum comes from a family of Sephardic Jewish origin headed by his father, Vidal Nahum, who was born in Thessaloniki (Greece) in 1894 and later became French. His mother, Luna Beressi, conceived him in very dramatic conditions because due to a heart condition she could not have children.

However, his father never found out about this difficulty and the delivery took place in conditions of high risk for the mother and the child, which left consequences in Morín during his childhood.

At the age of 10, the future writer lost his mother, so his maternal aunt, Corinne Beressi, along with his father took charge of continuing his upbringing.

The early death of his mother marked Morín for life. After this episode, he sought refuge in literature for his sadness and became a voracious reader of books on the most diverse topics. Instead of playing like any other child, he spent hours reading, a hobby he shared alongside cycling and aviation.

Studies and political activity

At the age of 19 he entered the university in search of more knowledge and intellectual training. Morín wanted to learn more about film, music, social sciences, and nature.

At the Sorbonne he enrolled in the Faculty of Letters, the School of Political Sciences and the Faculty of Law, simultaneously. After reading various authors of the Enlightenment during the 18th century, she became involved in philosophical work.

At age 15 he joined the ranks of the Spanish Republican government during the Spanish Civil War. During this time, the readings led him to be linked to politics and socialist thought through the Popular Front, which he joined when he joined the Federation of Frentista Students.

This political group, led by Gastón Bergery, rejected the war and proposed a national socialism.

Clandestine fight

In 1940 he had to interrupt his university studies and flee to Toulouse when the Nazis invaded France. During this time he dedicated himself to helping refugees and became an enthusiastic follower of Marxist socialism.

Despite the war, his voracity for reading of all kinds did not cease and he became a regular visitor to the municipal library. In 1942 he managed to obtain a degree in History, Geography and Law at the Sorbonne.

He took an active part in the French resistance and in 1941 he joined the French Communist Party. In August 1944, he actively participated in the struggle for the liberation of Paris.

At age 21, Morín was already very committed to the actions of the resistance against the Nazi occupation. He distributed pamphlets, helped refugees and promoted all kinds of subversive activities. At that time he was living in hiding, so he decided to change his surname Nahum to "Morin".

His triple characteristics of Jew, communist and member of the French Resistance made him a target of the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police. In August 1944 he participated in resistance actions that would culminate in the Paris Insurrection.

Family life and politics

A year later he married Violette Chapellaubeau, a sociologist whom he met during his student life, and he moved from Paris. From there he left with his wife to settle in Landau in der Pfalz, Germany. At that time he held the rank of lieutenant colonel in the French Army of Occupation.

In 1946, he returned to Paris and left his military career to continue his political activities. However, he was expelled from the French Communist Party in 1952 due to his critical positions, set out in an article published in the newspaper France Observateur.

Morín denounced the deviations and excesses of the Soviet communist regime under the fist of Josif Stalin; it marked differences with Tito, the Yugoslav leader, and with Mao's Chinese revolution.

His pacifist convictions and strong social commitment led him to participate in the Intellectual Committees for Peace in rejection of the war in Algeria and the remilitarization of Germany.

At that time, thanks to the recommendation of other intellectuals, he was admitted to the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS).

Between 1948 and 1949, Edgar and his wife moved to Vanves due to Violette's pregnancy, where the young couple lived with great financial straits. Violette taught philosophy classes to help support the home. Their first daughter Iréne was born in 1947 and a year later Véronique was born, the second.

His marriage to Violette was dissolved and in 1963 Morín married the plastic artist Joahnne Harrelle, from whom he also separated shortly after. Years later, in 1984, his father died at the age of 91.

Then in 1982 he married Edwige L. Agnes, with whom he lived until February 2008 when she passed away. Then he met his current partner Sabah Abouessalam.

Contributions to philosophy and sociology

Morin's philosophical and sociological contributions can be divided into stages for practical purposes:

1945 - 1960

In his first book written between 1945 and 1946, entitled Germany's Year Zero, Morín recounted his own experience in Germany, totally destroyed after the war.

That year he was hired by the French Ministry of Labor to run a newspaper whose readers were German prisoners of war. He works for the Patriote Résistant, Parallèlle 50 and Action newspapers.

In 1951 he wrote the book Man and Death, which became the basis of his vast culture, covering fields as diverse as philosophy, social geography, the history of ideas, ethnography, Prehistory, child psychology, mythology, psychoanalysis and the history of religions, among others.

Being a member of the Sociology Commission of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), between 1951-1957, he began his investigative work with the topic "Sociology of cinema", with which he continued his research on "The imaginary reality of man ”, previously outlined in his book Man and Death.

His socio-anthropological investigations on cinema are exposed in: El Cine o el hombre imaginario (1956) and then in 1957 in the book Las estrellas: myth y seduction del cine.

Between 1957 and 1960 he worked on his book Autocritique, which served to make a first assessment of his political life and literary work. Then in 1959 he published a manifesto in favor of a new “true cinema” on which the film Chronicle of a summer shot in 1960 will be based.

That same year, he founded the Center for Mass Communication Studies (CECMAS) which later became the Center for Transdisciplinary Studies: Sociology, Anthropology, Semiology.

1960 - 1970

His work led him to visit several Latin American universities in Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia and he was appointed Head of Research at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS).

In 1962, together with Roland Barthes and Georges Friedman, he founded the journal Comunicaciones which he directed from 1973 to 1990. In that year he began to write La vida del submit. Later, together with Lefort and Castoriadis, he worked at the Center for Research in Social and Political Studies.

Morín participated in a large multidisciplinary research project between 1965 and 1967, which took place in the Plozevet commune.

That year he also founded the Group of Ten, together with Robert Buron, Jaques Robin and Henri Laborit, in order to exchange ideas and discussions.

In the years 1965-1967, he was invited to participate in a large multidisciplinary research project, financed by the General Delegation for Scientific and Technical Research, in the Plozevet commune.

In 1968 he entered the University of Nanterre in replacement of Henri Lefébvre and became involved in the student demonstrations of the French May that run throughout France.

He wrote in Le Monde about the Student Commune, traveled to Rio de Janeiro to teach at the Candido Mendes University and quickly returned to Paris.

1970 - 1990

On the student demonstrations of that year he wrote a second batch of articles entitled A revolution without a face. Between 1969 and 1970 she investigated rumors of the abduction of young women in Orleans by Jewish merchants.

From this investigation Morín wrote the book El Rumor de Orleans, which scrutinizes the sources of the rumor, as well as the channels of dissemination, values, myths and anti-Semitism.

He then moved to Southern California to give various lectures on the relationship between biology and sociology at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. There he discovered the "biological revolution" that emerged after the findings on the structure of the genetic code.

The studies and readings during this trip to the United States provoked in Morín a review of his theories. He delved into General Systems Theory and deepened his knowledge of cybernetics, information theory, and the new ecological thinking at Berkeley.

Transdisciplinary thinking

In those years he continued his search and development of an authentically transdisciplinary thought, that is, one that not only allowed exchanges between the biological sciences and the human sciences.

At the beginning of the 70s, together with other researchers, he created the International Center for Bioanthropological Studies and Fundamental Anthropology, which later became the Royaumont Center for Human Sciences.

At this stage he began his exploration of the theory of self-reproducing automata, the principle of the order of noise and “organizing chance”, as well as the theories of self-organization.

These new intellectual currents led Morín to conceive his masterpiece The Method, whose introduction he wrote in New York, also influenced by the readings of Popper, Bachelard, Tarsky, Gottard Gunther, Wittgenstein, Feyerabend, Holton and Lakatos.

Morín renewed his interest in the elaboration of a general anthropology, after the Colloquium organized by the Royaumont Center in 1972 “The unity of man: biological, universal and cultural invariants”.

The works and discussions of the event were collected and published in a book entitled The unity of man. The primate and man. His attention was focused on the “uniduality of man” from which the book The Lost Paradigm (1973) emerged.

That year he was in charge of the Center for Transdisciplinary Studies (Sociology, Anthropology, History) of the School of Higher Studies where he conceived the project of The Method.

In 1989, Morín co-produced a book about his father that he titled Vidal y los susyos, together with his daughter the anthropologist Véronique Grappe-Nahum and the historian and linguist Häim Vidal, a scholar of Sephardic culture.

1990 - 2000

From the beginning of the 90s he chaired the Committee of the National Center for Scientific Research on Sciences and Citizens. From there he tried the practical development of his thesis on cognitive democracy, based on the conviction that scientific knowledge must be disseminated among citizens for their benefit.

During the years 1997 and 1998 the French Ministry of Education invited him to present a plan for the development of a national educational reform. Also in 1998 he went on to direct the Scientific Council created by the Minister of Education Claude Allégre, with the aim of deliberating on the "reform of knowledge in institutes".

At the end of that year, he also organized the First Inter-Latin Congress for Complex Thought, and in 1999 he created the Edgar Morin Itinerant Chair dedicated to the teaching of complex thinking, sponsored by UNESCO.

Then in 2001 he was appointed President of the Agency for European Culture and the Republic of France, and since 2002 he is Director Emeritus of the National Center for Scientific Research.

Plays

- Germany's Year Zero (1946)

- Man and Death (1951)

- The Spirit of Time (1966)

- Commune of France: The metamorphosis of Plozevet (1967)

- Rumor of Orleans (1969)

- The Lost Paradigm: Human Nature (1973)

- The Method I. The nature of nature (1977)

- Method II. The Life of Life (1980)

- Science with a conscience (1982)

- On the nature of the USSR (1983)

- Sociology (1984)

- Method III. The Knowledge of Knowledge (1986)

- Thinking Europe (1987)

- Introduction to Complex Thinking (1990)

- Method IV. The Ideas (1991)

- Homeland (1993)

- My demons (1994)

- Human Complexity (1994)

- A Sisyphus Year ”, 1994 newspaper (1995)

- Love, poetry, wisdom (1997)

- The Well-Ordered Mind (1999)

- The seven knowledge necessary for an education of the future, UNESCO (2000)

- The Method V. The humanity of humanity (2001)

- For a policy of civilization (2002)

- Method VI. Ethics (2004)

- Civilization and Barbarity (2005)

- Towards the abyss? (2008)

- The Way. For the future of Humanity (2011)

- The Path of Hope (2011)

References

1. Edgar Morin: Life and work of the nonconformist thinker. Retrieved on September 19, 2018 from books.google.com
2. Edgar Morin. Consulted from goodreads.com
3. Edgar Morin. Consulted biografiasyvidas.com
4. Edgar Morin - Biography. Consulted of jewage.org
5. Edgar Morin, International Official Website. Consulted of edgarmorinmultiversidad.org
6. Who is Edgar Morin. Consulted of ciuem.info