Year XXXIX, Number 1, July 2026

Mauro Ceruti

Professor emeritus of Philosophy of Science at Iulm, Milan. Co-author with Edgar Morin of "La nostra Europa. Un manifesto per pensare l'Europa del futuro" (Raffaello Cortina, 2025).

He would have turned 105 on July 8. When he reached the milestone of "his century," I asked him: how would you define yourself? He replied: a human being, with many roots: of Sephardic Jewish origin, partly Italian and partly Spanish, deeply Mediterranean, European, a citizen of the world, a child of the Earth-Homeland...

These multiple roots were the matrices of both his thought and his life. He was the son of Jews who had immigrated from Spain to Livorno through the diaspora of 1492. In the second half of the nineteenth century, his closest ancestors settled in Thessaloniki, then a predominantly Sephardic city characterized by peaceful multicultural coexistence within the Ottoman Empire. From there, his parents would move to Paris.

These Jewish roots, he said, nevertheless had no cultural content. Not educated in the synagogue, he in a sense "became" Jewish later, in danger, during the Resistance and the Nazi occupation, when Edgar David Nahoum "became" Edgar Morin. After the war, he wanted to keep both surnames officially: Nahoum, known as Morin. In the vicissitudes of his family, he saw the stigmas of European ambivalence (between civilization and barbarism), found a vocation for a plural identity, and developed a rejection of all forms of fundamentalism. He felt himself to be a post-Marrano, "uprooted and multi-rooted," in the tradition of Montaigne, Cervantes, and Spinoza, who had been subjected to the synagogue's anathema. Like them, he never forgot his Jewish roots. But he felt himself to be the child of a cursed people, not of the chosen people. He integrated this memory into his universalist formation, grounding in it a feeling of compassion for all the subjugated, the colonized, and the racially persecuted. He himself defined post-Marranos as "those who, under the effect of the collision between two religions, have gone beyond both and developed a psychological experience that allowed them to rid themselves of dogmas and produce a form of thought woven from questioning and criticism."

He nourished himself on the Greek and Latin classics and on the Gospels. With Pascal, "his" philosopher above all others, he saw charity as "the sole object of Scripture." As with Pascal, faith, doubt, reason, and religion fought and nourished one another within him. He too was led to the "wager." His, however, was a wager on humankind, nourished by an "unfailing attachment to rationality" and by an "awareness of the great Mystery into which the greatest knowledge ultimately flows." It was a wager that led him to understand the necessity of acting amid uncertainty and the risks faced by all our values, and that led him to recognize himself in the "religion of that which binds," in the religion of fraternity.

He was the first in his family to be born in France, and he "became" French little by little, through school and through his appropriation of the language and culture. He also "became" a cultural European by regenerating an awareness of Europe's multiple identity, the hybridization of its cultures, the flexibility of its borders, and the richness of the migrations that have taken place there and continue to do so. He only began to feel European in the early 1970s, when he realized that "Europe's inhuman colonial power had been lost: Europe had become a poor thing." Although in recent years he confessed to having lost faith in Europe, seeing it so fragmented, subject to technobureaucratic forces, and helpless in the face of migrants and wars, he nevertheless continued to recognize that it was precisely the humanistic culture of our Europe that had rooted within him a profound sense of the common destiny of a "planetary" humanity that is both one and many.

Throughout "his" century of life, Edgar Morin was a protagonist of a century of history. The exceptional nature of its mystery, the exploration of which has been entrusted to us as destiny. It is precisely in the self-reflections on his personal journey that the germ and the profound meaning of his philosophy of complexity are revealed, developed through the monumental and brilliant six-volume work The Method.

A few days ago, I asked him: how do you see the future? Uncertain, he replied. And he added, summarizing the core message of Lessons from a Century of Life (the title of his testamentary book): "The human adventure has arrived at a gigantic crisis in which our destiny is at stake. Probability favors the worst. But the improbable and the unpredictable are also possible. It seems that Thanatos will be the victor. Yet, whatever happens, our lives can have meaning only by taking the side of Eros." And heartfelt until the end was his appeal: let us wake up! We must change course.

He had never abandoned the desire to settle in the "country where lemons grow." He renewed this desire when, deeply moved, he received the volume One Hundred Edgar Morins, which we dedicated to him – one hundred Italian friends – for his hundredth birthday, to commemorate the hundred and more paths of inquiry and life that he had opened and traveled. Just a few days ago, I had imagined another journey together, through the places of his Italy, his Tuscany, where he lived for long periods in the fraternal conviviality of our community of friends...

His testimony lies in the intertwining of his ways of being a man, a scholar, and a writer. He witnessed, interpreted, and fought against the birth and formation of totalitarian systems. As a very young man, he experienced the Resistance and then immediately became responsible for communications in the provisional government of liberated Berlin, where he wrote his first book, Germany Year Zero, which inspired Roberto Rossellini's film of the same name.

His Self-Criticism regarding the communist creed cost him marginalization and humiliation. He was able to identify and interpret unprecedented phenomena in their formative stages: the possibility of humanity's self-annihilation through nuclear weapons, the culture industry, cinema (through his pioneering books, now considered classics, which at the time earned him accusations from academic mandarins of dealing with a "hairdresser's subject"), the development of adolescent culture and May '68 (of which he was the only chronicler "from within" through his famous articles in Le Monde), ecological thought (which he outlined in 1970), the end of the Cold War, the new science (through complex thought), the crisis of education (through his pedagogical trilogy, now disseminated throughout the world), globalization (through the idea of Earth-Homeland), climate change, the pandemic, the new wars, and the planetary crisis (through the idea of polycrisis and his Path for the Future of Humanity).

He found in self-observation the opportunity to probe "the living core of the subject," reflecting on the perverse and blinding power of ideas that become objects of idolatry and end up possessing us, and on the difficulty of resisting self-deception. In his diary writing and essays, among the highest achievements of French literature, he portrayed the human being not as the "microcosm" of the modern vision, placed at the center of the cosmos, but rather as the infinitesimal fragment of a cosmic explosion, impenetrable in its mystery, yet whose exploration has been entrusted to us as destiny. It is precisely in the self-reflections of his personal story that the germ and the profound meaning of his philosophy of complexity are revealed, developed through the monumental and brilliant six-volume work The Method.

Originally published in Corriere della Sera, May 31, 2026 edition.