The thing which embraces
How do we explain complex thinking?
Q: [...] If there's a word very dear to you, it's the definition of "complex thinking". It'd be very cool if you could explain it to us in a short and simple (sic!) way.
A: The latin word complexus means the thing which embraces. I observe that, given our education, our knowledge is separated, compartmentalised, isolated in many islands. This makes us incapable of embracing our largest problems. Nowhere we teach what it is like to be human. To grasp what it means to be human, we must understand that our reality is at once physical, biological, cultural and spiritual. Homo sapiens, the reasonable man, is at the same time Homo demens, capable of any folly. All our knowledge on the human being is isolated. In my books Le Paradigme des temps perdu and L'Humanité, I tried to reunite it.
Complex thinking can link together what is separated. In order to do this, it resorts to certain principles, methods (this margin is too narrow to contain them!) and notions, that we can use to gain a better understanding. Naturally, total knowledge is impossible. Complexity is not completeness.
For example, we live in times of many interlinked crises. There's an ecological crisis of the planet and a civilisation crisis (of both our and other civilisations transformed by our modernity). We experience economical challenges not far from a crisis. We live through a war, which risks becoming a world war.
In short, we live through a set of entangled crises, which we can't grasp in its totality, but we must try understand its links and be very vigilant on what's happening.
(Edgar Morin, Mon ennemi est la haine, Editions de l'Aube, 2023, pp. 43 - 45)
Translation and emphases mine. Beware: they’re worthy of the most unreliable narrator!
David