These notes are a synthesis close to the literal, with some comments on connections with Habermas, Peter Senge and Paulo Freire, in which the convergences of the paradigm of complexity are identified with the critical school on rationality and communicative action, with the systemic vision of the fifth discipline and with the constructivist or liberation pedagogy.
Edgar Morin, a French thinker of great impact today, proposed in a document requested by UNESCO to promote seven knowledge necessary for the education of the future, which are:
- Facing the blindness of knowledge: error and illusion Feeding the principles of pertinent knowledge Teaching the human condition Teaching earthly identity Facing uncertainties Teaching understanding Cultivating the ethics of the human race
With clear depth it goes deep into the secret corners of the human being and thus builds a series of networks or loops to represent the map of the complex human condition:
- Individual-society loopIndividual-species loopIntelligence-affection loopAction-context loopMeans-ends loopRisk-precaution loopEgocentricism-self-justification-self-deception loopBrain-spirit-culture loopAffection-reason-impulse loopIndividual-society-species loopIndividual-society-noosphere loop
In the foreword, which is a summary of the book, he offers the following guidelines:
1. The blindness of knowledge: error and illusion.
It is necessary to introduce and develop in education the study of the cerebral, mental and cultural characteristics of human knowledge.
2. The principles of relevant knowledge.
Establish the link between the parts and the whole, apprehend the objects in their contexts.
3. Teach the human condition.
The human being is at the same time physical, biological, psychic, cultural, social and historical (structures and areas of action, in Habermas). To apprehend what it means to be human, its complex identity and its common identity.
4. Teach earthly identity.
The planetary destiny of the human race. Humans live a common destiny.
5. Face uncertainties.
The same ones that have appeared in the physical, biological and historical sciences. Abandon deterministic concepts of human history, assume the unexpected and be able to face it.
6. Teach understanding.
It is both the means and the end of human communication and needs a reform of mentalities. Hence the need to study incomprehension from its roots.
7. The ethics of the human race.
Education must lead to an anthropoetics, which contemplates the triune character of the human being, at the same time individual-society-species and builds democracy and terrestrial citizenship, while taking humanity as a planetary community and becoming aware of our Earth-Homeland.
The development of the work continues as we present you:
1. blindness of knowledge: error and illusion:
The Achilles heel of knowledge:
To the error of perception is added the intellectual error of knowledge in the form of a word, idea or theory, subject to the risk of interpretation in the subjectivity of the knower and his vision of the world (Habermas again).
The development of intelligence is inseparable from that of affectivity (emotional intelligence). There is no higher state of reason, but rather an intelligence-affect loop.
Mental errors:
No brain device allows distinguishing hallucination from perception, sleep from waking, the imaginary from the real, the subjective from the objective, egocentricity and self-justification, or the tendency to project the cause of evil onto the other (Senge).
Intellectual errors:
Our systems of ideas (worldviews and rationalities, in Habermas, (H) mental models, in Senge (S)) protect errors and illusions.
The errors of reason:
It is rationality that corrects. True rationality, open by nature, dialogues with reality and is the fruit of argued discussion of ideas (communicative action, H.). True rationality is not only theoretical or critical, but also self-critical.
The paradigmatic blinds:
The master concepts of intelligibility (validity claims. H.) are order in determinists, matter in materialists, spirit in spiritualists, and structure in structuralists. All exclude or subordinate the concepts that are antinomical to them, such as order-disorder, spirit-matter, matter-spirit, event-structure. As they are exclusive, they separate the human from the natural and the natural from the human, without being able to conceive the natural-cultural, cerebral-psychic uniduality of human reality. The Cartesian paradigm separates the subject from the object, dissociating reflective research from science and objective research.
Imprinting and standardization:
The determinism of explanatory paradigms (mental models, Senge) is associated with the determinism of convictions and beliefs that impose on each one the imperative force of the sacred, normalizing dogma and prohibitive of taboo (silent hand and untouchables, Senge).
The noology: possession:
Since the beginning of humanity, the noosphere was born: the sphere of things of the spirit, which is why we live in the middle of a jungle of myths that enrich cultures. Myths have taken shape from ghosts formed by our dreams and imaginations. Ideas have taken shape from the symbols and thoughts of our intelligences.
Societies domesticate individuals by myths and ideas (colonization of the world of life. H.). It would be necessary to become aware of our alienations in order to be able to dialogue with our ideas, to control them as much as they control us, and to apply truth and error tests (validity claims susceptible to criticism. H.).
It is difficult to distinguish between idea and idealism, between rationality and reason, the same to recognize the hidden myth under the label of science or reason, since both myth and ideology destroy and devour facts (paradigmatic crisis in the structure of scientific revolutions said Thomas Kuhn).
Very much like Habermas, Morin emphasizes that we must carry out a crucial fight against ideas, but we can only do it with the help of ideas and we must only recognize as worthy of faith those ideas that accept that the real resists the idea..
The uncertainty of knowledge:
We must understand that there are bio-anthropological, socio-cultural and noological conditions that question man, the world and knowledge. Popper would name them as three worlds: the objective or natural, that of thought or culture, and the subjective.
Habermas points out four structures: of culture and science, of society and morality, of personality and art, and of the organism and its adaptation; he makes these structures correspond to three spheres of action: the cognitive-instrumental, the practical-moral and the aesthetic-expressive.
The ideas that I argue here, Morin says, are not only those that I own, above all they are those that possess me. The key problem is to establish coexistence with our ideas, as well as with our myths and detect lying to oneself. We need to civilize our theories and make them fit for self-reform.
2. The principles of relevant knowledge:
Of relevance in knowledge:
Knowledge of the world becomes an intellectual and vital necessity at the same time. It is the universal problem for every citizen of the new millennium: How to achieve access to information about the world and how to articulate and organize it? How to perceive and conceive the context, the global, the whole-part relationship, the multidimensional, the complex?
The context:
Claude Bastien says that cognitive evolution is not directed towards the elaboration of increasingly abstract knowledge, but on the contrary towards its contextualization, an essential condition for the effectiveness of cognitive functioning.
The global, the relationships between the whole and the parts:
Pascal's principle to inspire the education of the future: if all things are caused and causative, aided and aided, mediate and immediate, and all interwoven by a natural and imperceptible bond that links the most distant and the most different, it is not possible to know the parts without knowing the whole and neither to know the whole without knowing the parts.
The multidimensional:
The human being is at the same time biological, psychic, social, affective, rational. Society contains historical, political, economic, sociological, religious dimensions…
The complex:
The complex is what is woven together, it is the union between unity and multiplicity.
General intelligence:
Knowledge must mobilize what the knower knows about the world and activate his intelligence. In the mission of promoting the general intelligence of individuals, the education of the future must use existing knowledge, overcome antinomies (paradoxes or contradictions) caused by progress in specialized knowledge, as well as identify false rationality (instrumental rationales according to to interests, Habermas would say).
The antinomy:
The disciplines of knowledge have closed in on themselves and have been separated into the biological sciences, human sciences, exact, aesthetic, etc. The weakening of the perception of the global leads to the weakening of individual responsibility and the weakening of solidarity, since citizen ties are lost.
Disjunction and locked specialization:
At the same time, the division of disciplines makes it impossible to take what is woven together, that is, according to the original meaning of the term: the complex.
Reduction and disjunction:
The reduction simplifies the complex, hides risk, novelty and invention, suppressing the human from the human, with a deterministic mechanical mentality (Habermas called it instrumental reason).
The fragmented, compartmentalized, mechanistic, disjunctive, reductionist intelligence breaks the complex of the world into separate fragments, splits the problems, separates what is united, unidimensionalizes the multidimensional. It is a myopic intelligence that ends up being blind.
False rationality:
We are on the way to a subordination to Artificial Intelligences, AI, installed deep in minds in the form of technocratic thought, since they do not understand the living and the human (colonization of the world of life, Habermas calls it).
The 20th century has lived under the reign of a pseudo-rationality that has pretended to be the only one, but that has atrophied understanding, reflection and long-term vision and its insufficiency to deal with problems has made it one of the most serious problems of humanity.
It is about understanding a thought that separates and reduces along with one that distinguishes and relies. It is not a question of abandoning the knowledge of the parts for that of the wholes, nor the analysis for the synthesis: it is necessary to combine them.
3. Teach the human condition:
The education of the future must be universally centered on the human condition. To know the human is to place it in the universe and at the same time separate it from it.
Concomitant advances in cosmology, earth sciences, ecology, biology, prehistory, have modified ideas about the Universe, the Earth, Life and Man himself. It is impossible to conceive of the complex unity of the human through the disjunctive thought that conceives our humanity in an insular way, outside the cosmos that surrounds it, the physical matter and the spirit of which we are constituted.
The cosmic condition:
We have recently abandoned the idea of an orderly, perfect, eternal Universe for a Universe that is born in radiation, in dispersed becoming, where they act in a complementary, concurrent and antagonistic way: order, disorder and organization.
Our earth is a tiny spinning top that revolves around a wandering star on the periphery of a small galaxy in the suburb of a gigantic expanding cosmos.
Physical condition:
Life arose in the flashes of the resplendent solar whirlwinds, we are just a straw from the cosmic diaspora.
The terrestrial condition:
The Earth was self-produced and self-organized depending on the sun, it became a bio-physical complex from the development of its biosphere. We are both cosmic and terrestrial beings. As living beings on this planet we are vitally dependent on the terrestrial bisphere: we must recognize our very physical and very biological earthly identity.
The human condition:
Hominization should be the subject of education, since it shows how animality and humanity together constitute our human condition, from homo habilis, erectus, Neanderthal, sapiens, in which a process of bipedization, manualization, erection of the body, cerebralization, is followed. social complexity and emergence of language and culture. The hominid is humanized by a double biophysical and psycho-socio-cultural principle. In Habermas the emphasis is on the emergence of symbolic language and on intersubjective interaction, socialization and individuation, which occur at the same time.
Like the point of a hologram, we carry within our uniqueness all humanity, all life and also the entire cosmos, including its mystery, which undoubtedly lies within us.
The human of the human: Uniduality:
The human is a fully biological and fully cultural being: homo sapiens is also homo demens.
The brain-spirit-culture loop:
Man is completed by and in culture. There is no culture without a brain and no spirit without culture. The human mind is an emergency that is born and affirmed in the brain-culture relationship.
The reason-affect-drive loop:
They have an unstable, permutable, rotating relationship. Rationality does not have all the power, it can be dominated, enslaved and submerged by affectivity or impulse.
The individual-society-species loop:
Interactions between individuals produce society and in it culture emerges. Constructing an ethic of the fullness of the subject and its free expression, constitute fundamental agreements in Morin and Habermas, they are also the means and the end for Senge and Freire. All truly human development means joint development of individual autonomy, community participation and a sense of belonging to the human species.
Unitas multiplex: unity and human diversity:
The individual field and the social field:
Cultural diversity and plurality of individuals:
The Culture is precisely said; cultures are said precisely, because culture does not exist except through cultures. The human being is himself both one and multiple; he constitutes in himself a cosmos of physical and instinctual drives and dreams and phantasms, misguidance of lucidity and crazy storms.
Sapiens-demens:
Only rational, technical or utilitarian visions must be abandoned, since the human being feeds on antagonists:
Sapiens and demens rational and delusional
Faber and ludens hardworking and playful
Empiricus and imaginative practical and imaginative
Economicus and
consumans economic and wasteful Prosaicus and poeticus prosaic and poetic
Homo complexus:
Diké, the wise law, is the daughter of Ubris, the excess. The human tissue is at the same time rational, neurotic, childish… Insanity is a central problem of man, because it probes the unspeakable and is on the border of genius, beyond the real, the logical, the social and the cultural, in the land of uncertainty.
Despite the complex boiling of human nature, technical and scientific development has taken place, civilizations have been established that have borne fruit in philosophies and sciences: Humanity has dominated the Earth and we have become citizens of the planet.
4. Teach earthly identity:
Globalization is one of the problems of our time and education must work with a polycentric thinking for identity and earthly consciousness.
The planetary era:
The world becomes more and more a whole. Morin points out aspects of globalization that we call globalization. Development is at an unsustainable point. A richer and more complex notion of development is necessary, which is not only material, but also intellectual, affective, moral.
The Legacy of the 20th Century: The Heritage of Death: Human evolution is a growth in the power of death.
Nuclear weapons and new dangers:
The unbridled domination of nature by technique drives humanity to suicide.
Death of modernity:
If modernity is defended as unconditional faith in progress, in technology, in science, and in economic development, then this modernity is dead.
Hope: The Contribution of Countercurrents:
The ecological countercurrent, the qualitative countercurrent, the aesthetic countercurrent, the countercurrent of spirituality and frugality, the countercurrent of the principles of solidarity and the countercurrent of the ethics of peace.
It is necessary to civilize the Earth-Fatherland as the common home and garden of humanity.
In the contradictory game of possibilities:
The human mind could develop as yet unknown abilities in intelligence, understanding and creativity. The anthropological, sociological, cultural and mental possibility of progress restores the principle of hope, but without scientific certainty or historical promise. For this reason the awareness, the awakening of the will, of courage, of chance, have become urgent and essential. Thought reform has become vital. Habermas would say that a new rationalizing theory must be built and Senge that mental models must be transformed.
Earthly Consciousness and Identity:
It is possible to advance in the notion Land-Patria. For this reason it is necessary to learn to be there, on the planet: to learn to live, to share, to communicate and to receive communion. (They are similar to the principles of learning to be, to do, to know, to live together and to discern, which we began to share).
Habermas explains it like this: in the world of life, a communicative action is required that leads us to understanding, coordination of action, interaction, socialization and individuation.
We must inscribe in us the anthropological, ecological, civic, earthly and spiritual consciences. States must abandon their sovereignty and integrate a polycentric and acentric world, not only in the political and economic sphere, but above all culturally. East and West, North and South must reconnect their disjunction in favor of the wisdom of living together.
It is imperative to save human unity and save human diversity, civilize and solidarity the Earth, learn an ethic of planetary understanding. These are almost the same terms as Habermas, when he asks to build a new morality, to build intersubjectivity and consensus through dialogue. For its part, Senge focuses the fifth discipline on dialogue and organizations that learn from themselves.
5. Face uncertainties:
The expected does not come true and for the unexpected a god opens the door, wrote Euripides.
A great achievement of intelligence would be to be able to get rid of the illusion of predicting human destiny.
Historical uncertainty:
Who would have imagined that an assassination would cause a world war, or that a workers party would create a totalitarian power, or that an alliance to liquidate fascism would turn into the cold war, or that the fall of the Berlin wall would bring down the Soviet empire, Or that a fanatic from the Far East would destroy the two twin towers of New York? Becoming is now in question and will be so forever. The future is called uncertainty.
The creative and destructive story:
Difference-bearing individuals constitute a potential deviation. History is a complex of order, disorder and organization. It always has two opposite faces: civilization and barbarism, creation and destruction, genesis and death. Eastern mystics speak of the same contradictions in terms of ying and yang.
An uncertain world: Facing uncertainties:
The education of the future must return to the uncertainties linked to knowledge, since the principles of brain-mental, logical, rational and psychological uncertainties intervene. Habermas also attacks these various categories of analysis, calling them rationalities and validity claims, making them open to criticism. Rationalities are according to means, ends, norms, principles, values and understanding.
Validity claims are truth, conformity with norms, legitimacy, and authenticity.
Humanity is taken on an unknown adventure.
The uncertainty of the real:
Ideas and theories do not reflect but rather translate reality. Our reality is none other than our idea of reality. To understand the uncertainty of the real is to know that there is a still invisible possible in the real.
The uncertainty of knowledge:
Uncertainties and the ecology of action: The risk-caution loop:
Pericles used to say that we know how to prove both extreme audacity and not undertake anything without careful reflection.
The ends-means loop and the action-context loop:
All action escapes the will of its author when it enters the game of inter-retro-actions of the environment where it intervenes. It is again, pure communicative action in the world of life, for Habermas.
Long-term unpredictability:
No action is sure to act in the sense of its intention.
The bet and the strategy:
The strategy raises the problem of the dialogue between ends and means. The rationality of action, according to Habermas. Everything that implies opportunity implies risk and thought must differentiate between them. The renunciation of the best of worlds is by no means the renunciation of a better world. Let us then know how to expect the unexpected and work for the improbable. Eastern philosophies also recommend the same posture of consciousness.
6. Teach understanding:
The spiritual mission of education is to teach understanding between people as a condition and guarantee of the intellectual and moral solidarity of humanity.
Here Morin meets Habermas, Senge and Paulo Freire.
The two understandings:
Intellectual and objective understanding and intersubjective human understanding.
Understanding necessarily includes a process of empathy, identification and projection.
Always intersubjective, human understanding needs openness, sympathy, and generosity.
An education for obstacles to understanding:
The understanding of the meaning of another's words, their ideas and their vision of the world is always threatened from all sides:
There is noise that parasitizes the transmission of information, creates misunderstanding or non-understanding.
There is polysemy of a notion that, stated in one sense, is understood in another, like the word culture.
There is ignorance of the rites and customs of the other, the misunderstanding of values, ethical imperatives, other world views and from one mental structure to another.
Egocentricity:
In reality, misunderstanding yourself is a very important source of misunderstanding others. We cover our shortcomings and weaknesses, but we are ruthless with those of others.
Ethnocentrism and sociocentrism:
A moral judgment always translates a rejection of analysis and even thought.
The reducing spirit:
The multiple and multiform obstacles to understanding are constituted by the egocentricity-self-justification-self-deception loop.
The conjunction of individual, intellectual, and collective misunderstandings hinder the relationships between individuals and groups, requiring the addition of intellectual and ethical components to the economic, political, legal, and social spheres, in order to develop dual understanding, intellectual and human.
The ethics of understanding:
This is the essence of Habermas' proposal for communicative action. Understanding is an art of living, which asks us to understand misunderstanding, to argue and refute, instead of excommunicating and anathematizing. If we know how to understand before condemning, we will be on the path of humanizing human relationships. Habermas would call it communicative action for understanding and intersubjectivity. Senge calls it expert discussion.
Good thinking: Introspection:
The mental practice of permanent self-examination is necessary for the understanding of others. Here the connection with the evaluation we hope to carry out is made explicit.
Awareness of human complexity: Subjective (sympathetic) openness to others:
Another reference to Habermas and Senge.
The internalization of tolerance:
There are four degrees of tolerance: the first is to respect the right to utter a purpose that seems ignoble to us; the second is the democratic principle of respecting the expression of ideas that are antagonistic to ours; the third is to verify that the opposite of a deep idea is another deep idea, in which there is a truth that we must respect, and the fourth is the awareness of human alienations by myths, ideologies or gods.
Planetary understanding, ethics and culture:
The only true globalization that would be at the service of the human race is that of the understanding and intellectual and moral solidarity of humanity. Understanding is also learning and re-learning permanently (we would say unlearning and learning to learn).
Cultural, aesthetic and thought globalization does not tend to be homogenizing, but rather to the free expression of the particular originalities of the nation, peoples or individuals.
The planetary hemispheres must dialogue and understand each other. Morin says that understanding between cultures, peoples and nations passes through the generalization of open democratic societies.
But there is the epistemological problem of understanding that is both the means and the end of human communication and whose development requires a planetary reform of mentalities, which must be the work of the education of the future. In this case they coincide with Senge's mental models and Habermas's worldviews, which are magical, mythical, metaphysical, religious, philosophical, scientific and aesthetic.
7. The ethics of the human race:
Any conception of the human race means joint development of individual autonomy, community participation and the sense of belonging to the human species.
A properly human ethic, that is, an anthropo-ethic that includes the individual-society-species loop, and that involves the conscious decision of:
- assume the individual-society-species human condition in the complexity of our being, achieve humanity in ourselves in our personal consciousness, assume human destiny in its antinomies and fullness, work for the humanization of humanity, carry out the double piloting of the planet: obey life and guide life, achieve planetary unity in diversity, respect in the other, at the same time, both difference and identity with oneself, develop the ethics of solidarity, develop the ethics of understanding, teach the ethics of the human gender, achieve humanity as a conscience and planetary citizenship, bet on an individual conscience beyond individuality
The individual-society loop: teaching democracy:
Citizens produce the democracy that citizens produce. It is necessary to overcome the regimes that colonize the world of life of individuals and prevent this from happening at all levels of action.
Democracy and complexity:
Democracy needs diversities and antagonisms, at the same time as consensus (return to Habermas's postulates). Democracy supposes and nurtures the diversity of interests, as well as the diversity of ideas, since it needs both conflicts of ideas and opinions that give it vitality and productivity.
Democracy demands both consensus, diversity and conflict, as well as the expression of the loop of ideals freedom-equality-fraternity.
The democratic dialogic:
In democracy, antagonistic terms, such as consensus-conflict, norms and freedom, etc., dialogue and complement each other.
The future of democracy:
The more technical politics becomes, the more democratic competition recedes, in the machine where science, technology and bureaucracy are intimately associated and experts in all fields reign (new mention of Habermas).
The reduction of the political to the technical and the economic and from the latter to growth, the loss of referents and horizons.
Democratic regeneration supposes the regeneration of civility, solidarity and responsibility, towards the development of anthropo-ethics.
In educational settings, the class must be the place of learning of the argued debate, (Habermas) of the rules necessary for discussion, (Senge) of the awareness of the needs and the processes of understanding the thought of others. (Freire)
The individual-species loop: teaching terrestrial citizenship:
Terence used to say: I am human, nothing that is human is strange to me.
Kant said that the geographical finiteness of our land imposes on its inhabitants a principle of universal hospitality, and the common terrestrial destiny imposes solidarity on us in a vital way.
Humanity as a planetary destiny:
The individual and the species make up humanity, which has become a common destiny and has to be an ethical imperative.
The challenges that come are to save humanity while carrying out, through a policy of man, a policy of civilization, a reform of thought in the Land-Homeland; the development of the individual-society relationship in the democratic sense, and the development of the individual-species relationship in the sense of the realization of humanity.
The path is made by walking, Machado said. We must re-embark on the paths of hominization in humanization, a path of ascent to earthly citizenship.
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