Year XXXVII, Number 1, March 2024

Edgar Morin
Philosopher and sociologist

As I have often had the opportunity to say and write, Mauro Ceruti is one of the rare thinkers of our time to have understood and taken up the challenge that the complexity of our beings and our world poses to us. Through his ideas and also his generous organizational activity, he was the tireless weaver of an extraordinary and creative international and trans-disciplinary community of thought. Among other things, he was the promoter and inspirer, with Gianluca Bocchi, of the splendid symposium "The challenge of complexity", held in Milan in 1984, as well as of the historic symposium "Physis: inhabiting the Earth" held in Florence in 1986, seminal and decisive moments for the development of complex thought. His thought always contains and intertwines, nourished by it, three passions: the philosophical passion for the theory of knowledge, the political and civil passion for Europe, the ethical and pedagogical passion for the destiny of humanity.

Commenting, in 1986, on his book Constraints and Possibilities, which has now become a cornerstone of systemic epistemology, I observed that classical science could recognize rationality only in necessity and could only consider chance as irrational, and that Mauro was inviting us to explore a series of conceptual transformations of our theoretical conceptions, and was indicating the way to enrich and make more complex our vision of rationality.

His belief, which I shared and on my part developed in The Method, was that the real issue of our modernity was a renewal of the scientific and of the epistemological problems-area, capable of taking up the challenge of complexity. And we have both dedicated these decades to taking up this challenge. This challenge, for Mauro, emerges precisely from the bowels of European history and civilization, and Europe is faced today with it as an unavoidable task.

He shows, in his speeches and in his books, that in thinking about Europe one cannot dissociate its multiple diversity from its unity, indicating that the Europe to be built (if this is still possible) must be that of unity in multiculturalism. Presenting the French edition of our book Our Europe, in 2014 I wrote that it was «the work of two brotherly spirits, that of Mauro Ceruti and mine: I find myself in him as he finds himself in me». Together, in that book, we raised the alarm.

Europe, a breeding-ground of great civilizations and capable of integrating very different ethnic groups, in its ambivalence has experienced two specific diseases: the national States' internal “purification” and the sacralization of borders. After the catastrophe of the two World Wars which had brought Europe to the brink of the abyss, the European Union allowed the polyethnic integration of small mono-ethnic nations and therefore tended to eliminate the disease of purification. And it has also produced a desacralization of borders.

However, in Europe today the specter of a new purification appears, namely that against migrants whose condition is seriously threatened, as well as against migrants who are mercilessly rejected. And so we raised our voice against the idea of a "fortress Europe": especially since Europe was born from migrations, from prehistory to historical times; especially since its own "miserable outcasts" emigrated to the Americas; and even more so since the ravages of the development imposed on Africa are pushing proletarianized Africans to move to Europe. And we have also stigmatized the last obstacle to the European Union, which comes from the European States themselves, who have agreed to abandon their economic sovereignties, but resist the renouncement of their political absolute sovereignties, whereas the vital and fundamental problems that they have to face require, by their very nature, the relinquishment of that absolutism.

It is in this context that Mauro Ceruti’s complex thought comes to the rescue. He shows, in fact, that the essential problem, that of understanding our time, is a matryoshka-problem, one that contains within itself other problems, each of which in turn contains other problems…

Understanding our time means in fact understanding the globalization that drives the human adventure, which all over the planet has become interdependent, made up of actions and reactions, in particular political, economic, demographic, mythological, religious; it means trying to question the future of humanity, which is driven by the joint engines of science/technology/economics towards an "augmented man", though not at all improved, and towards a society governed by algorithms, tending to be guided by artificial intelligence and, at the same time, to make us banal machines. Simultaneously, these same science/technology/economic drivers lead to catastrophes which are in turn interdependent: degradation of the biosphere and climate warming, which lead to massive migrations; multiplication of deadly threats with the increase in nuclear weapons, chemical weapons and the appearance of cyber weapons, capable of disintegrating societies. All this causes anguish, withdrawal into oneself, delirious fanaticism. Thus there looms large, on the one hand, the inhumanity of the "best of worlds" and, on the other, the barbarity of a Mad Max situation, resulting from a planetary mega-catastrophe. The problem of the human adventure poses us the question: what is human? But the nature of our own identity, as Mauro has continually observed, is not taught at all in our schools, and therefore is not recognized by our minds. All the elements that could be useful to recognize it are dispersed in countless sciences (including physical sciences, since we are also physical machines made of molecules, which are in turn made of atoms) and also in literature, which reveals human complexities in its masterpieces.

The problem of human identity includes within itself the problem of Nature. This is present in a vital way not only in the environment, but also within human identity itself, which carries within itself the problem of nature, that is both physical and cosmic. The human is in fact not just a singular element within the cosmos, but carries the cosmos within himself. It is not just a singular being in life, it carries life within itself. Thus, step by step, the question amplifies and multiplies. And so, since the beginning of his research, Mauro has shown how much we need trans-disciplinary knowledge, capable of extracting, assimilating and integrating many branches of knowledge that are still separate, compartmentalized and fragmented. And showed how much we need a complex thinking, that is, capable of linking together and articulating branches of knowledge, and not just juxtaposing them. All of his work is animated by his effort to understand human complexity, which requires not to isolate the human, but to place it in its cosmic, physical, biological, social, cultural contexts, and by now also in the planetary community of destiny. His work has stimulated a broad international debate in many research domains, such as clinical psychology, pedagogy, cognitive sciences, but also organizational sciences, architecture, anthropology, sociology…

And this volume is testimony to his original influence in multiple disciplinary fields. Mauro Ceruti has outlined a philosophical path that takes up the challenge of complexity in our time; he outlined an anthropological perspective from which human identity emerges as an evolutionary and irreducibly multiple identity, through the interweaving of multiple stories; he showed how our time makes it unavoidable to think together, and not in opposition, about identity and diversity; he motivated the urgency of an education reform capable of valorizing individual and cultural diversity, and at the same time aimed at integrating the fragmentation of knowledge. With his pedagogical writings he contributed significantly to the three reforms of knowledge, thinking and teaching, and, above all, he stimulated us to draw connections between these three reforms. And by affirming the vital urgency of "educating for the planetary era", he outlined a perspective that helps us orient ourselves in our age of changes, produced by the vortex of globalization. A perspective which, due to its originality, outlines the horizon for thinking about school reform in a time of complexity, in which everything is connected.

The result is a passionate reflection on the increasingly ambivalent condition of contemporary humanity, of which, with clarity and visionary ability, he has been able to highlight the unprecedented risks, but also the great and equally unprecedented opportunities. The basic idea of his philosophy is that humanity is constitutively incomplete, even as a species. And that constitutively its manifestations, individual and cultural, are incomplete and multiple. Therefore the challenge for the endangered future of humanity is to develop a consciousness of a "community of destiny" of all the peoples of the Earth, as well as of all humanity with the Earth itself. Mauro draws the horizon of a new planetary humanism, which can only arise from the encounter between the different cultures of the planet, from our ability to think together of unity and multiplicity, from our ability to connect individual and collective diversities of the human species, without diminishing and dissolving them, because only by treasuring the different present and past human experiences  will it be possible to regenerate a creative process of co-evolution with the planet Earth, our only homeland wandering in the immensity of the cosmos.

Likely? No. Possible? Perhaps. In the image of history outlined by Mauro Ceruti, the set of evolutionary possibilities is not static and predetermined: the universe of the possible regenerates itself recurrently, in a discontinuous and unpredictable way. Mauro thinks, like Blaise Pascal, that human identity is self-transcendence: “l’homme passe infiniment l’homme” (“man infinitely surpasses man”). Therefore, he writes in the conclusion of his book The time of complexity, “the identity of the human species contains the possibility, however unlikely, of the emergence of a new humanity”.

The human condition in the global age contains within itself the possibility of a true universalization of the humanistic principle. And transforming the fact of planetary interdependence into the process of building a "civilization" of the Earth, promoting an evolution towards coexistence and peace, is the difficult and even improbable, but at the same time creative and unavoidable task that is posed to us by the challenge of complexity, by the challenge of giving birth to a planetary humanity. On the occasion of the publication of this volume* dedicated to his work, I like to renew my personal homage to the powerful, creative and to me fraternal spirit of Mauro Ceruti.

* The book (in Italian) is  L. Damiano, F. Bellusci (Eds.), La danza della complessità. Dialoghi con la filosofia di Mauro Ceruti, Mimesis, December 2023