Our Edgar Morin
Edgar Morin, who passed away on the eve of his 105th birthday, has rightly been remembered as one of the greatest intellectual figures of recent decades. His thinking and actions often led him to swim against the tide: a partisan in Nazi-occupied France, a theorist of interdisciplinarity in an academic world that rigidly separated fields of knowledge, and a scholar of complexity in an era increasingly inclined towards the simplification of messages. But the most important legacy he left to many – and, if I may say so, to EStà among them – is the need for a holistic mindset, capable not of separating knowledge and concepts, but of connecting them and understanding their interrelationships in depth. In this context, there is perhaps no more representative expression than the one with which Morin emphasises the need to always link the part to the whole, the whole to the parts, and the parts to one another.
The decision to call ourselves ‘Economics and Sustainability’ and to approach sustainability as a matter that is at once environmental, social, economic and cultural would not have come about without the influence of the French thinker.
In a fragmented, confused world, permeated by narratives that are often episodic and taken out of context, another of his reflections remains extraordinarily relevant:
‘We must promote a form of knowledge capable of grasping global and fundamental problems in order to situate partial and local knowledge within them. This is a crucial issue that is consistently overlooked1’.
Any research, training or analysis that abandons this approach risks producing partial interpretations, incapable of making a real impact on our understanding of reality. The work we have sought to carry out over recent years – setting aside the results, which we leave to those who have collaborated with us to evaluate – has always sought to put this inspiration into practice.
Finally, there is one last aspect of Morin’s legacy that we feel particularly close to: the idea that knowledge should not be limited to describing the world, but should help to transform it. Understanding the links between problems, identifying their causes and assessing their consequences is not a neutral exercise: it is the prerequisite for imagining and bringing about change. From grand, long-term visions right down to the recommendations concluding a research report, the idea of knowledge serving social improvement represents one of the French thinker’s most fruitful contributions. And it is perhaps one of the best ways to keep his teachings alive.
Massimiliano Lepratti, EStà – Economy and Sustainability
1) E. Morin, The Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future, Cortina, Milan, 2001, p. 12 of the Italian edition.
