Complexité
At Edgar Morin’s, complexity is not complication (a large number of parts to count), but the quality of what is woven together—the Latin word *complexus* literally means “what is interwoven.” A complex phenomenon cannot be reduced to its parts: the whole and the parts mutually produce one another. Thinking complexity means rejecting the kind of thought that dissects, isolates, and simplifies.
La société est un « complexe » au sens du mot latin complexus qui signifie « ce qui est tissé ensemble ».
The common misconception equates complexity with complication. A clock is complicated: many gears, but patient disassembly fully accounts for it. An ecosystem, a society, an organism are complex: they cannot be understood by summing their parts, because those parts co-produce one another. Morin embeds the whole within the parts as much as the parts within the whole.
Hence his rejection of what he calls disjunctive thinking—the kind that separates the object from its context, the discipline from its neighbors, the human from nature. Complexity is not a celebration of vagueness: it demands, instead, holding together distinction and conjunction, order and disorder, without sacrificing one to the other. It is a discipline, not a surrender.
It is sometimes likened to Teilhard’s noosphere or the self-organizing systems of cybernetics, which share this concern for the living whole. But Morin’s distinctive move is less a cosmology than a reform of knowledge, inseparable from reliance—the act of reconnecting what specialization has torn apart. Complexity ≠ complication: the latter is resolved through analysis, the former requires learning to make connections.