Complex thinking
14
Jan
Nothing favors obscurantism more than the idea
that is possible to make what is complex simpler, ignore the organicity of social, ecological and cultural problems and how they compose themselves.
Complex thinking is born from the idea of nature and the universe as organisms that are increasingly mysterious and whose structure is gradually revealed, through the hard work of those who first admit the complexity of phenomena and second resist temptation to simplify them by imagining that simple solutions and ideas would be enough to solve them.
Man himself is but a complexification of nature, they agree with this not only the most elaborate scientific thought but also theologians like Teilhard Chardin.
Scientific simplification is called reductionism, religious simplification reductionism, cultural and social simplification has no specific name, but it can be said that it is confused with ignorance and dualism.
Morin explains in Introduction to Complex Thinking: “the ancient pathology of thought gave an independent life to the myths and gods it created. The modern pathology of the spirit is in the hypersimplification that makes it blind in the face of the complexity of the real” (Morin, 2008 p. 22).
In the scientific field explains it epistemological blindness: “Those disputed between Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend, etc., are ignored. Now this blindness is part of our barbarism. It makes us understand that we are always in the barbaric age of ideas. We are always in the prehistory of the human spirit.” (Morin, 2008, p. 23).
Nothing more complex than reducing it to the simple, as Bachelard stated, there is no simple, there is only simplified, which most often mutilates and deforms the phenomenon, inducing thought to obscure liquidity.
Morin, E. (2008) Introduction to complex thinking. 5th. ed. Lisbon: Institute Piaget.
