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On Some Affinities of Morin’s

Complex Thinking with That of
Chinese Classic Philosophy
a
Yi-Zhuang Chen
a
Central-South University, Changsha, Hunan
Province, China
Published online: 15 Apr 2013.

To cite this article: Yi-Zhuang Chen (2013): On Some Affinities of Morin’s Complex
Thinking with That of Chinese Classic Philosophy, World Futures: The Journal of Global
Education, 69:3, 167-173

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 World Futures, 69: 167–173, 2013
Copyright 
C Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 0260-4027 print / 1556-1844 online

DOI: 10.1080/02604027.2012.762204

ON SOME AFFINITIES OF MORIN’S COMPLEX THINKING

WITH THAT OF CHINESE CLASSIC PHILOSOPHY

YI-ZHUANG CHEN
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Central-South University, Changsha, Hunan Province, China

Morin (1921) founded the complex mode of thinking in order to remedy the de-
fects of the Western classic simple mode of thinking. In doing so, he approached
to some degree the mode of thinking inherent to the Eastern civilization. This
article elucidates that for some principles of Morin’s complex thinking, such as
correlation of opposites, recursive causality, and union of unity of multiplicity,
there were similar ideas in Chinese classic philosophy. This shows that the com-
plex paradigm of thinking, in a certain point of view, will be the fusion of Western
and Eastern cultural factors. Besides, in integrating his theory of complexity with
the reality of our time to find out solutions to the issues of globalization, Morin
has become one of the representative thinkers of the planetary age of humankind.

KEYWORDS: Chinese classic philosophy, complexity, Edgar Morin, globalization, mode

of thinking.

Edgar Morin’s complex thinking is a criticism, rectification, and complement of

the simple thinking. The simple thinking, as rationalistic and habitual fashion of
thinking, consists in grasping unity in multiplicity, stability in variation, regularity
in randomness, as well as in the linear pattern of thinking progression from
one item, as premise or cause, to another, as consequence or effect. This mode
of thinking has displayed its great usefulness in our daily life and the research
activities of classic science. But its validity is not limitless, and its inadequacy
has been revealed since the latter part of the twentieth century. Functioning like
a double-edged sword, it has realized huge achievements at the same time it
has created many serious problems, due to its taking the reductionistic, one-
sided approach to complex, multifaceted objects or issues. The complex mode of
thinking advanced by Morin, going above the systematic approach, compels us to
see the things from a perspective that could link unity and multiplicity, stability
and variation, regularity and contingency, and display the cognition as a dynamic,
spiral process underplayed by the interplay between the subject and the object.
We see in setting up of the complex mode of thinking not only a creation or in-
novation, but also a confluence of all diverse methodological factors that emerged
in the history of human thought and opposed the dominant mode of thinking. In

Address correspondence to Yi-Zhuang Chen, Department of Philosophy, College of Pub-

lic Administration, Central-South University, Changsha, Hunan Province 410083, China.
E-mail: chenyizhuang@[Link]

167
 168 YI-ZHUANG CHEN

the both Western and Eastern history of thought, there were expressions of the un-
orthodox mode of thinking, such as dialectics. Many scholars reasonably estimate
that in the civilization of Eastern nationalities there is more strong existence of
heretical factors in relation to the orthodox mode of thinking in modern civiliza-
tion. Some scholars even deem that the Western mainstream way of thinking relies
on the left hemisphere of the brain, that excels in logical analysis, whereas the
Eastern mainstream way of thinking relatively more relies on the right hemisphere
of the brain, that attempts to understand experiences through overall intuitive
impressions.
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Morin’s complex thinking, as an outcome of combating the deficiency and

malpractice of the Western simplifying thinking, contains some similarities with
Chinese classic philosophical thinking; this is a interesting and significant fact.
This article will bring to light which factors of Chinese classic thinking approached
Morin’s complex thinking, and thus demonstrate that, at a certain angle and in
some degree, the enterprise of establishing the paradigm of complex thinking is
that of uniting Western and Eastern ways of thinking.
In the third volume of his voluminous work La Méthode—La Connaissance
de la connaissance, Morin formulated three leading principles for the complex
mode of thinking, namely: (1) the dialogical principle: bring together two antag-
onistic principles that on the face of things should repel one another but are in
fact indissociable and essential for understanding a single reality; (2) the principle
of organizational recursion: products and effects themselves produce and cause
what produces them, both the first and the latter forming a generating loop; (3)
the hologrammatic principle: not only is the part present in the whole, but the
whole is present in the part (Morin 1986, 98–103). These three principles, respec-
tively, rebel against the following key ideas of classic simple mode of thinking:
(1) leading notion and principle should be unique and incompatible with opposite
notion and principle; (2) linear thinking pattern according to which only cause
produces effect in the real sphere and only promise produces consequence in
the cognitive sphere; (3) there is a dichotomy: either reductive standpoint that
believes that the part determines the whole, or holistic or systematic standpoint
that believes that the whole determines the part.
The I Ching, or “Book of Changes,” constitutes one of the roots of Chinese
civilization. Its original form was devised by Fu Shi, a legendary Chinese sage who
lived during the age of hunting and fishing over 4,500 years ago. First he invented
the unbroken and broken lines to represent the polar forces of the universe: yang
(positive) and yin (negative). This is the origin of the eternal conceptual framework
of yin–yang duality in China. In its primitive sense, yang meant the brightness
of the sun or a sun-bathed slope, while yin meant lack of brightness or a shady
slope. Later, yang came to represent male, activity, heat, dryness, hardness, and
so on; correlatively, yin represented female, rest, cold, humidity, softness, and so
on. In short, for ancient Chinese, all phenomena came to be classified in terms of
yang and yin or to be regarded as comprising two opposing aspects. As two cosmic
prime forces, yang and yin co-operate to produce the universe and all its constituent
parts and to regulate their movement. As the I Ching puts it, “yang is the principle
that make thing commence, while yin is that which completes them.” During
 MORIN’S COMPLEX THINKING & CHINESE CLASSIC PHILOSOPHY 169

the ulterior age, the Confucian–Taoist world outlook focused on the principle of
yin–yang complementarity in contradiction. This shows that Chinese intelligence
inclined to believe that the cosmos is governed by a bipolar principle and cannot
be reduced to a single ultimate principle. Thought is governed by the principle
that opposites are exclusive and incompatible, but real reality is governed by the
complementarity of opposites. In this way, they viewed reality in its dynamic
aspect: “when the sun stands at midday, it begins to set; when the moon is full, it
begins to wane” (I Ching). From this perspective, all things in essence exist in the
tension between the two poles. Their dynamic states of existence are the outcome
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of evolutive balance of yin–yang interaction.

The movements of the world have been seen as the advance and decline of yang,
followed by that of yin: each of two forces moves forward in time, progressing to
a point when it is dominant; it then gives way before the advance of the other; and
together they contrive by these repeated movements of ascent and descent to bring
about the perpetual cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. The cycle was seen as taking
place in five phases. At this point, the principle of yin and yang was combined with
the principle of wu hsing (five agents or elements), which participate to regulate
the cycle in a more detailed way. The relation between the five agents is sometimes
described as the “order of mutual production”: fire arises from wood, and in turn
produces earth; from earth there is produced metal, which in turn becomes liquid,
and it is from the sustenance of water that wood grows. In the foregoing scheme,
each of the “five agents” that rules a phase of transformation is seen as an integral
part of the major process of nature. In the second main sequence to be adopted by
some thinkers, stress was placed on the individual strength of each of the material
agents. Each one, and the phase that it symbolized, was explained as coming into
existence by conquest of its predecessor, and the order of the Five is described
as that of “mutual conquest.” Thus, metal conquers wood; in its own turn it is
reduced by fire. Fire is extinguished by water, whose force is dammed up by earth;
and earth is subject to manipulation and control by implements made of wood.
For Chinese philosophers, where all that can be observed is subject to change, the
theory of yin–yang and the “five agents” may be regarded as their answer to the
search for permanence in a highly volatile world. It concerns a pattern of dynamic
equilibrium and recursive causality in an organic whole.
The notion of correlation of opposites and that of transformative loop were
fully developed in the classic of Taoism Tao te ching (Book of Tao and its virtue),
composed by Lao-tzu (sixth century BC). The supreme concept of the system
is the Tao, which holds the yin and the yang as two sides and causes order to
reign in the universe. Lao-tzu said: “The movement of Tao consists in reversion”
(ch. 40) By this, he criticized the linear thinking of human. For instance, “Nothing
under Heaven is more soft and weak than water. But for attacking the hard and
strong nothing can surpass it. And nothing else can ever replace it. The weak
overcome the strong, the soft overcome the hard. Everyone in the world knows
this but no one can put it into practice . . . ” (ch. 78) Here, the author of Tao te
ching took the figure of water to illustrate the Tao’s qualities, that is, humility,
softness, weakness, but this apparent weakness contains a latent force capable of
overcoming the world’s hardest. This implies an implacable natural law whereby
 170 YI-ZHUANG CHEN

everything that has advanced to its extreme turns into its opposite. “People who
have grown robust, age” (ch. 55), for example. This law maintains the harmony of
the world as an organic whole, but it often goes against the will and the spontaneous
intelligence of human being. Hence, Lao-tzu advised people “to discard the excess,
the luxury, the indulgence” (ch. 29).
In the planetary era, the new chapter of globalization has been opened. Along
with the extension of the great trend of economic globalization all over the planet,
the cultural identity of diverse nationalities are increasingly threatened to disap-
pear. In this circumstance, Morin proposes overcoming the traditional antagonism
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that exists between the particular and the universal, in order to safeguard the diver-
sity of cultures, developing the cultural unity of humanity. He says: “It is essential
to be able to consider the unity of the many and the multiplicity of the unity.
We tend too much to overlook the unity of mankind when we see the diversity
of cultures and customs and to dismiss the diversity when we see the unity. The
real problem is being able to see one in the other. . . . One must always be able
to think of the unit and the multiple; if not, minds incapable of considering the
unity of the many and multiplicity of the unit will inevitably promote a unity that
standardizes and multiplicities that withdraw into themselves” (quoted in Rapin
1997). The union of unity and diversity constitutes one of the important aspects
of Morin’s paradigm of complexity. As concerns this respect, we also find the
similitude of Morin’s thinking in the Chinese classic philosophy, especially in the
current of Chinese Buddhism.
Chinese Buddhism represents the Mahâyâna branch that spread to the regions
of Central Asia and the Far East. The Indian Buddhism was divided into two
branches: the Hı̂nayâna or Lesser Vehicle, and the Mahâyâna or Great Vehicle.
Hı̂nayâna Buddhism represents the original teachings of the Buddha. He preached
that all existence is impermanent and illusory, that the suffering of life is craving
for this existence and sensual pleasure, and that the suffering can be suppressed by
realizing that the essence of the reality is void and hence extinguishing the craving
for life. This deliverance is called nirvâna. But, the Hı̂nayâna only shows the path
of salvation for a few people who practice the religious life in the monastic order
for his personal salvation. The Mahâyâna has reformed the doctrinal framework
of the Hı̂nayâna and offers salvation not to the select few but to all sentient beings,
preaching that all sentient beings have the potentiality of becoming Buddha. It
invented the religious ideal, Bodhisattva. Although qualified to enter nirvâna as a
result of merits accumulated in the past, the Bodhisattva delays his/her final entry
and chooses to remain in the world until he/she has brought every sentient being
across the sea of misery to the calm shores of enlightenment. This implies restoring
the relative reality and the limited value of the mundane world. In response to this
trend of spirit, the great master of the Mahâyâna—Nâgârjuna has formulated the
twofold truth theory, called also the theory of the Middle Path. In this theory, he
posits two “truths”: conventional truth and ultimate truth as both the content of, and
ways of viewing, reality. Conventional truth, also called “mundane truth” (),
indicates the temporary reality of the everyday phenomenal world as experienced
through our senses. Ultimate truth, also called “real truth” (), indicates the
noumenal void of the world. Only one who grasps both of the two truths embraces
the total essence of the Being.
 MORIN’S COMPLEX THINKING & CHINESE CLASSIC PHILOSOPHY 171

The Hua-yen and T’ien-t’ai Buddhist philosophies, along with Chan Buddhism,
have been understood as the most Chinese forms of Buddhism. In these Sinified
forms of Buddhism, the Chinese mind has fully exercised once again its age-old
philosophical preference by emphasizing the importance of daily reality as a major
philosophical agenda. Consequently, the Hua-yen school of Buddhism advocated
the world of diversities, suggesting that the multiple reality is all reflection of
the Buddhist teaching of dependent co-arising. The fact that various aspects of
phenomena are reflections of one Buddhist dharma, however, does not mean
that the diversity can be reduced into one totalitarian vision. The idea about the
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relationship between phenomena and noumena in Hua-yen develops into a well-

known theory of the fourfold worldview that, as a hallmark of Hua-yen teaching,
foregrounds its acknowledgment of diversity of the real world and at the same time
its harmony. The “realm of phenomena” (shih fa-chieh ) as the first level
of the fourfold worldview designates the world of many, the concrete reality in
which various diverse particularities exist. The “realm of noumenon” (li fa-chieh
), the second level of the vision, proposes an overarching principle that
encompasses the diversity in the phenomenal world; in the third level, since each
and every phenomenon in the world is the reflection of noumenon that pervades
through individual entities in the phenomenal world, Hua-yen imagines a world
in which the phenomenal diversity exists in harmony with the principal (“non-
obstruction of noumenon against phenomena”—li-shih wu-ai ); and in
the final stage, all the particular phenomena in the world, being illustration of
noumenon, exist in harmony without obstructing one another. This fourth level,
which Hua-yen Buddhism calls “non-obstruction among phenomena” (shih-shih
wu-ai), represents the world seen from the vision of the enlightened.
The T’ien-t’ai master Chih-I of the sixth century set up the system of his
theory and practice based on the Madhyamika (middle) insight, developing his
interpretation of the two truths that culminated in his threefold truth formulation.
This three truths system introduces the middle truth as a third, absolute truth
that transcends and unifies the conventional and ultimate truths. All things have
no independent reality of their own, therefore they are said to be empty. But the
emptiness of all things does not mean pure nothingness. Their temporary existence
is in one sense real, where they can be reached by ours senses. The synthesis of
emptiness and phenomenal existence, of universality and particularity, is called
the middle truth (). This middle does not mean something between the two;
it is over and above the other two. Therefore, these three truths of the T’ien-t’ai
School emphasize the idea of integrality and mutual identification: the part is in
the whole and the whole is in each part; the noumenon is realizable through and
manifested in phenomena, and there is no noumenon besides phenomenon, in this
sense the phenomenon itself is noumenon. All this is in order to avoid thinking in
terms of a dichotomy.
In more some detail, the attainment which is realized through this threefold
contemplation is described negatively as the elimination of various levels of
delusion and ignorance, and positively as the attainment of the three kinds of
wisdom. First, through “entering emptiness from temporary existence” one de-
stroys the first level of various deluded views and attitudes, and fulfills the “all
wisdom” () that realizes the emptiness of all things. Secondly, through
 172 YI-ZHUANG CHEN

“entering temporary existence from emptiness” one destroys “ignorance,” which

here must refer to the next level of delusion: only viewing the emptiness, and
realizes the temporary existence of all things in their proper discrimination,
and thus fulfills the “wisdom of the path” (). Finally, through avoid-
ing both extremes and entering the middle one destroys fundamental ignorance
and fulfills “universal wisdom” (). In this case the three aspects of
emptiness, temporary existence, and the middle are contemplated simultaneously
and spontaneously, and immediately perceived as being integrated, nondual, and
synonymous.
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In his resistance to the deficiency of the Western classic mode of thinking,

Morin’s complex thinking has approached the Eastern classic mode of thinking.
But, as Morin says, “complex thinking is not the opposite of simple thinking; it
incorporates simple thinking and unites simplicity and complexity” (Morin 1996,
14) From this point of view, complex thinking does not reject simple thinking,
and just remedies its defects. At the bottom, the Western mode of thinking and
Eastern mode of thinking, each has its strength and weakness; the creation of the
paradigm of complex thinking depends on their fusion. In such a manner that we
can achieve a “whole-mind” approach, wherein the holistically and aesthetically
astute right hemisphere of the brain is put into use along with the analytically
and logically oriented left hemisphere. Thus, we gain both a comprehensive and
precise view of reality.
Morin is in our time an important and original French, European, and even
mondial thinker. Because of his transdisciplinary research activities and com-
prehensive understanding and reflections, he has accomplished an inconformist
system of thought, which, as conceptual union of particularity and universality,
is the combination of philosophy and science, natural science and the humani-
ties, and different disciplines of science. Besides, Morin has tightly integrated his
theory with current praxis, striving to consider from the complex perspective the
reality and prospect of the globalization—a huge complex enterprise of today’s
humankind. Here, the complexity of viewpoint is concerned in (or links up with?)
the overallness and integrality of human well-being. Through analyzing Western
modern civilization’s vices and virtues, he has indicated that this fourfold engine
combining science, industry, technology, and economics drives humankind into
a problematic, dangerous globalization. Our productivist and activist civilization
has totally neglected the social and human dimension, and hence creates as many
problems as it solves. In the planetary age, warns Morin, humanity’s survival
depends on its transition to a “world society” in which it develops new, globally
applicable forms of economic and technological regulation that curb its current
self-amplifying destructive tendencies (Morin 2001, 220–221). The new govern-
ing institution will be the polycentric federal regime of the world, as a means
of planetary regulation without authoritarianism. This is a model in reality that
embodies the notion of union of particularity and universality. On this basis, the
people of all nationalities can develop the worldwide social solidarity, thinking
in terms of sharing the Earth as a “homeland.” The “politics of civilization” that
aims to place humanity at the center of politics will be put into practice.
 MORIN’S COMPLEX THINKING & CHINESE CLASSIC PHILOSOPHY 173

Thus, Morin is not only a thinker of complexity, also thinker of the planetary age
and of globalization. Although he does not consider himself to be postmodernist,
but his thought concerns the age of postmodernity, and hence belongs to the future.

REFERENCES
Morin, Edgar. 1986. La Méthode III: La Connaissance de la Connaissance. Paris: Seuil.
———. 1996. A new way of thinking. The UNESCO Courier 2:14.
———. 2001. La Méthode V: L’humanité de l’humanité. Paris: Seuil.
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Morin, Edgar and B. Kern. 1999. Homeland Earth. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press.
Rapin, Anne. 1997, July. An interview with Edgar Morin. Label France, 28, 30–32.