Rhuthmos

Tribute to Edgar Morin and the Rhuthmoi of Nature – Part 1

Pascal Michon — 2026-05-30T05:00:00Z

Sommaire

This text was originally published online in 2020 and in a printed version in 2021. I am republishing it here as a tribute to the great Edgar Morin, who recently passed away.

The very same year, 1977, Edgar Morin published La Méthode. La nature de la nature – Method: Towards a Study of Humankind: The Nature of Nature (trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992). This essay was the first installment of a long series designed to establish a new scientific paradigm: “the paradigm of complexity.” The latter stood as a challenge to the fragmentary and reductionist spirit dominating the scientific enterprise and advocated a dynamic and productive interpenetration of disciplines based on the concepts of “permanent reorganization,” “information” and “loop.” In order to be able to perceive the universe in its true “nature,” i.e. as a “complex expanding whole,” or as “one single physico-bio-psycho-socio-cultural system,” physics, biology and social science should overcome their separation and work tightly together. Six volumes were published between 1977 and 2004 [1].

In volume 1, Morin approached the paradigm of complexity mainly under its physical aspect, while volume 2, 3 and 4 were respectively dedicated to discussions of the contributions of life science (1980), anthropology of knowledge (1984), and theory of beliefs and ideas (1991). However, he explained later that he had first written a draft in four parts that had been eventually developed into four volumes, and that all four subjects had actually already been introduced in the first one (see Preface in 2008, pp. 13-14). Since the volumes 5 and 6, dedicated to the relation between species, individual, and society, and to ethics, were added retrospectively in 2001 and 2004, we are therefore legitimate in limiting ourselves here to the first volume, even if further studies, extended to the following installments, would certainly be welcome.

Rhythmologically speaking, Method presented a paradoxical contribution. On the one hand, contrary to Lefebvre's, Barthes', and Serres' essays, it never referred directly to the concept of rhythm. Although Morin knew of a large number of disciplines and even, as we will see, was personally acquainted with some of the proponents of rhythmology and rhythmanalysis in his days, rhythm never became part of his vocabulary. But, on the other hand, not only Morin shared, as we will see, many ethical and political ideas with most members of the rhythmic constellation of the 1970s, but a significant part of the concepts he was manipulating was clearly related with the most recent science whose rhuthmic roots Serres' study had so powerfully illuminated. As we will see by following step by step his argumentation, somehow, his contribution replicated what Serres had done for the ancient materialist thought: it presented a complete rhuthmic worldview rooted in the latest scientific knowledge.

Concerning biographical data, we may limit ourselves to a few facts. As soon as 1940, Morin had become a member of the French Resistance and, the next year, had joined the Communist Party. However, like Henri Lefebvre, Morin had been quite critical concerning the post-war evolution of his party and was finally expelled in 1951. It is therefore no accident that in 1968, he succeeded Lefebvre at the University of Nanterre and passionately followed the student revolts for the daily Le Monde.

We do not know of any close collaboration with Michel Foucault, of whom he seems to have read only The Order of Things (see index, 2008, p. 2452), which did not fit, as we shall see, in his own dialectic or better yet, hermeneutical perspective. Likewise, whereas Discipline and Punish painted a disciplinary world in which individuals had almost no autonomy, Morin preferred to concentrate on their creativity and imagination, on everything that could derail the regulated course of events.

In a significant contrast, from the beginning of the 1960s, he had worked with Roland Barthes within the “Center for the Study of Mass Communication” established in 1960 at the École Pratique des Hautes Études by the sociologist Georges Friedmann, his mentor at the CNRS. In 1973, this center evolved into the “Center for Transdisciplinary Studies. Sociology, Anthropology, Semiology” and was codirected by Barthes and himself until 1977.

Finally, Morin was close to Michel Serres with whom he shared not only sympathetic views on the 1968 revolt, but also a renovated materialist perspective based on the latest progress of physical, life and computational science in the 20^th century. At least in the first volume, he cited extensively Serresʼ reflections on the history of science (see index, 2008, p. 2461).

Concerning now Morin's theoretical position, as we will see, the whole project of founding a “complex thought” was motivated by the deep ontological turn of science that had occurred around the middle of the 20^th century. Like Serres' reconstruction of the ancient physical “fluid paradigm,” Morin's opposition to the simplification of classical science and his project of “en-cyclo-peding” knowledge were heavily influenced by the remarkable return of the Ancient idea that everything from physical nature up to human societies and cultures, through living beings, was entirely supported and propelled by a fundamental and general creative dynamism.

We may therefore quite legitimately associate Morin's alternative worldview and epistemology with the previous rhythmic contributions we have studied hitherto. If the term “rhythm” was not part of his vocabulary, the subject “rhythm” itself was in fact at the center of his concerns—provided, naturally, it was taken in its pre-Socratic sense as “way of flowing.” Of course, the relationship with Serresʼ thought will appear more obvious than with those of Lefebvre, Foucault or Barthes. But we will see that some hidden links, even with the latter, quickly emerge as soon as we consider them from a rhythmological perspective. And that, while Morin's essay receives surprising new colors from its confrontation with the latter, reversely, it certainly sheds some light on them and their specific limitations.

Modern Rhuthmic Ontology

We can have some hints of Morin's proximity to his contemporaries' interest in rhythm by first looking at some of his intellectual sources of inspiration.

In an instructive survey on the multiple origins of the complexity paradigm, Michel Alhadeff-Jones has luminously emphasized its Bachelardian lineage (2008). Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962), as we have already noticed in chapter 1, was involved at the beginning of the 1930s in a debate with Henri Bergson (1859-1941) on the nature of duration, which opened the way to his founding of rhythmanalysis. But, in the very same years, he was also the first philosopher who legitimized the role of complexity as an ideal for contemporary science—and this is in my opinion no accident. In his famous book Le Nouvel Esprit scientifique (1934) – The New Scientific Spirit (1985), he formulated for the first time a “non-Cartesian” approach to science. While, he noticed, Cartesian epistemology reduces any complex phenomenon to the analysis of its components, understood as simple, absolute and objective, non-Cartesian epistemology favors a dialectical approach that apprehends phenomena as tissues of relations.

There is no simple idea, because, in order to be understood, a simple idea [...] must be inserted in a complex system of thoughts and experiences. (Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit, 1934/ed. 1978, p. 152 – quoted by Alhadeff-Jones, 2008, p. 68)

As Alhadeff-Jones put it, “Bachelard's recognition of complexity appeared therefore at the root of a new type of scientific explanation” (2008). But we should add that just as duration was not, as Bergson claimed, a linear and unified line similar to a melody, but composed of an intertwined bundle of instants—and therefore liable for a rhythmanalysis—scientific thought flow was not, as Cartesian philosophers had it, a linear intellectual process progressing from one simple fact to the next, but was composed of an intertwined and dynamic bundle of ideas. Bachelard did not mention rhythmanalysis in this instance but we must keep this proximity in mind when reading Morin. “Rhythm of duration” or “complexity of scientific thought” were actually two sides of the same concern. Although the former belonged to the philosophy of time and the latter to the philosophy of knowledge, each shed light on the other under a common concern for the organization of the flow of experience. Rhythm appeared as a complex organization of time, and complexity as a rhythmic organization of thought.

A second hint of Morin's proximity to the “rhythmic” concerns of his contemporaries can be found in the opening chapter of Method. Borrowing heavily from a famous article on “Science and Complexity” published in 1948 by Warren Weaver (1894-1978), who elaborated further, on his own, some of the epistemological ideas already introduced by Bachelard (Alhadeff-Jones, 2008), Morin started his inquiry with a long section dedicated to the “invasion of disorders” into the classical physical worldview that happened from the mid-19^th century and the paradigm change it finally triggered (pp. 29-38).

Imbued with the inherited ancient principles of order, balance, and measure, classical modern physics was based on a mechanistic and determinist perspective. The world was compared to a clock, run by immutable laws, and excluding any disorder.

Order, Master-Word of classical science, reigned from the Atom to the Milky Way. [...] From Kepler to Newton and Laplace, it is established that the innumerable nations of stars obey an inexorable mechanism. [...] This clockwork Universe marks time and crosses time unalterably. Its texture, everywhere the same, is an uncreated substance (matter) and an indestructible entity (energy). The laws of physics, except for the strange exception of the second law of thermodynamics, know no dispersion, wear, and degradation. The self-sufficient Universe maintains itself perpetually. The sovereign order of the Laws of Nature is absolute and immutable. Disorder is excluded, from the beginning, forever. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, pp. 29-30)

However, due to the introduction by Rudolf Clausius of the second principle of thermodynamics and the concept of “entropy,” or irreversible loss of energy, and the discovery of the relation of this loss to the increase in the internal molecular disorder by Ludwig Boltzmann (1850-1880), due as well to the introduction of disorder and probability into micro-physics by Max Planck (1900-1910), and finally due to the recognition of a genetic unregulated expansion of the cosmos by Edwin Hubble and others (1920-1970), the Platonic, Aristotelian, Thomistic, Galilean, Cartesian, Newtonian world, based on stability, order, hierarchy, general determinism, and laws became obsolete or, at least, was to be re-founded on principles utterly foreign to it.

After its collapse during the first half of the 20^th century, this world was replaced, from the 1950s, by a new world based on becoming, disorder, multiplicity, chance encounter that clearly emulated that of the ancient materialists.

As Serres, Morin first noticed that this new perspective presupposed a critique of straight determinism. Just as declination appeared in Lucretius in the laminar flow of atoms “incerto tempore, incertisque locis,” the universe was now conceived as “constituting its order and its organization in turbulence, instability, deviance, improbability, energy dissipation” (p. 38 – Morin's italics).

But he also noticed that, although the probability to produce lasting beings was infinitesimal—Serres referred for his part, one remembers, to phenomena “statistically of extreme rarity”—the universe had witnessed and still did the relentless “constitution,” “organization,” “emergence” of new beings. In other words, in this new perspective, organization, order, and laws did still exist but only as emergent and impermanent phenomena. Instead of being the overarching physical norms, order and determinism became the impermanent results of both a generalized disorder and an infinity of random processes of organization.

Contrary to what had been concluded as early as Clausius from the second principle, the new development of thermodynamics initiated by Ilya Prigogine (1917-2003) showed that the universe was not merely doomed to an unavoidable thermic death and a maximal entropy (p. 32). There was actually not exclusion but “complementarity between disordered phenomena and organizing phenomena” (p. 37).

A similar revolution had occurred during the same period, Morin remarked, in life science thanks to John von Neumann (1903-1957), Heinz von Foerster (1911-2002) and Henri Atlan (1931-), who conceived of the living respectively as “function[ing] with disorder,” as “constructed with disorder,” or merely as resulting from “chance as organizer” (p. 38).

Even cosmo-physics had adopted this perspective. The big bang theory supposed that “a concentrated state of infinite density would have been at the source of the Universe, which would have been born in and by an explosive happening” (p. 39). But nothing intelligible according to our common space-time physical standards could be concluded from it because it presupposed that there was properly no time and no space “before” the big bang, i.e. no “before.” It was therefore “useless to look for spatio-temporal or logomorphic figuration concerning the state or the being which precedes our universe” (p. 40). The question of the origin had to be tackled with purely theoretical tools.

Opportunely, mathematician and topologist René Thom (1923-2002) had recently proposed a mathematical representation of the notion of “catastrophe” (1972), which Morin defined as “change/rupture of the form in condition of irreducible singularity” (p. 40), and which gave us the necessary means to address the problem.

The fundamentally complex and rich idea that Thom brings is to tie all morphogenesis or creation of form to a rupture of form or catastrophe. It allows us, therefore, to read disintegration and genesis in the same processes. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 40)

And that mathematical revolution concerned not only the “absolute beginning” of the Universe but also “the whole metamorphic process of transformations which disintegrate and create.”

Different from the big bang which is a concentrated moment in time and which becomes a cause separated from the processes which triggered it and which it has triggered, the idea of catastrophe, while welcoming the idea of an explosive happening, is identified with the whole metamorphic process of transformations which disintegrate and create. Now, this process is still going on today. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 41)

To explain this genuine generative power of the being, much further in the book, Morin hypothesized that it existed, associated with “the causal determinism which governed classical science” and with the newer “probabilitary causality of a statistical character” (p. 305), an “endo-causality” resulting from the retroaction of the effect on its cause. This causality did not any longer connect, on a general basis called natural law, one cause with one particular effect, but introduced a “causal autonomy” that could strongly transform the expected result.

Just the idea of retroaction affects, and much more profoundly than it seems at first sight, the simple, external, anterior, imperial, classical idea of causality. Retroaction returns to the loop, that is to say to the organizational autonomy of the machine-being. Organizational autonomy determines a causal autonomy, namely creates an endo-causality, not reducible to the “normal” play of causes/effects. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 257)

This particular causality was responsible for the emergence of totally new beings possessing new “selves” or identity principles.

Endo-causality implies production-of-self. In the same movement in which the self is born from the loop, there is born an internal causality which generates itself by itself, that is to say a causality-of-self producing original effects. The self is, therefore, the central figure in this internal causality which generates and regenerates itself by itself. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 259)

The being was thus deeply temporalized, that is, not only inserted in a linear duration but considered as “active” and “organizing” by itself. “Everything [was] interactions, transactions, retroactions, organization.”

In nature, activity is a total organizational phenomenon. Everything is active in an active system, and all the more so since it must support and maintain stationary states. Activism is generalized: flux, disequilibrium, instability, turnover, reorganization, regeneration, disorder, antagonisms, disorganizations, looping, variations, fluctuations. Everything is interactions, transactions, retroactions, organization. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 231)

As we can see, there was no fundamental difference with the Ancient atomist ontology as reconstructed by Serres: there was no fixed beings interacting according to fixed laws; rather, the physis was a flowing chaos, yet relentlessly generating and destroying, by chance encounters and retroactions, greater or smaller pockets of impermanent order. Thus, even if Morin never referred to the concept of rhuthmos, his ontological reflection clearly prolonged the Ancient rhuthmic paradigm into a remarkable extension based on the latest discovery of modern science and mathematics.

Order, disorder, organizing potentiality must be thought of together, both in their well-known antagonistic character and in their unknown complementary character. These terms shuttle from one to the other and form a sort of moving loop. In order to conceive this, we need more than a theoretical revolution. A revolution of principle and of method are called for. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 41)

As a matter of fact, in the general conclusion of the book, Morin explicitly compared his view with that of the pre-Socratic thinkers. What will be described, in a following section, as the fundamental “event-ness” and “generativity” of the universe did only but resume the Ancient dynamic conception of the physis.

We have henceforth an immanent principle of organization, properly physical. Thereby physis recovers the generic plenitude which the pre-Socratics had attributed to it. It is this reanimated and regenerated physis that can be generalized, that is to say reintroduced into everything living, everything human. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 377)

Modern Rhuthmic Physics and Space-Time Theory

The same theoretical proximity can be observed in Morin's presentation of the latest progress of physics and Space-Time theory in the following sections in which he summarized the scenario of cosmogenesis as it had been reconstructed since Georges Lemaître's (1894-1966) and Edwin Hubble's (1889-1953) studies in the 1920s and 1930s.

Morin painstakingly described the first cloud of photons that rised up and dilated after the big bang, the extreme heat, the “original fire,” the decrease of temperature because of expansion, the materializing of the first particles (electrons, neutrinos, neutrons, protons), the “chance encounters” by which protons and neutrons, “bouncing in all directions,” “aggregated” to constitute nuclei of deuterium, helium and hydrogen, the “turbulences” that provoked inequalities at the heart of the fast expanding cloud, the first “atomic compounds,” the reinforcement of these first atomic nuclei by gravitational attraction of particles that reinforced in turn their fast-rising gravitational attraction, the “dissociation of the cloud” into proto-galaxies and of those proto-galaxies into proto-stars, the ignition of local thermonuclear chain reactions triggered by the multiplication of collisions between particles due to the increase in density, the balance reached, sometimes, between explosion and gravitational rush to the heart of the newborn stars, the general decrease and local dramatic increase of temperature due to the ignition of these thermonuclear machines, finally the constitution of planets circulating around the stars (pp. 44-46).

Not only most of Democritus' and Lucretius' atomist concepts were here already mobilized, but at the very root of these processes, Morin found, consistently with his “creative ontology,” the “capital” role played by what he called successively “inequality,” “deviation, even minute,” “minimal inequality,” “minute variations,” which clearly constituted modern versions of Lucretius' foundational concept of “clinamen.”

The universe is born in extreme heat, and this heat includes these forms of disorder: agitation, turbulence, inequality of process, chance character of interactions, dispersion. The idea of inequality is capital. The general recooling is not homogeneous: it includes its zones of unequal character and its local moments of reheating. [...] Inequality of development has as starting point the thermic character of the initial catastrophe. Beginning there, and no matter how minimal, there is inequality in the very emission of the cloud. Now, and this is what undermines in its very foundations the previous deterministic vision of the world, which was a vision of ice and not of fire: any deviation, even minute, which is constituted in the emitting source tends to grow and be amplified in an extraordinary way in the course of the process of diffusion. The minute variations which are produced in the very first conditions of dispersion are going to lead subsequently to extreme and extraordinary varieties. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, pp. 44-45)

In the same Lucretian vein, Morin emphasized, in the second part of the book, the genesic power of “the whirling form” which was “the primordial Form of being, existence, productive organization.”

We now understand why the whirling form has signaled to us everywhere, in the galactic skies, the circulating air and water, the flaming fire. It is the form in and by which turbulence is transformed into loop. It carries in itself the quasi-indistinct presence of chaos and genesis, all the while remaining the [primordial Form] [la Forme première] of being, existence, productive organization. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 224, my mod.)

The emergence of order and organization out of disorder and chaos was then allowed by the “agglutination” of atoms according to a modern analogon of the “congruence of figures, magnitudes, positions and orders” as Simplicius put it (see above, chap. 4), which consisted in various types of “interactions,” strong interactions bonding protons and neutrons, gravitational interactions accelerating the concentration of galaxies and condensation of stars, or electro-magnetic interactions binding electrons to nuclei and atoms into molecules (p. 48).

As a matter of fact, a few pages below, Morin paid homage to Heraclitus by clearly mixing, and therefore somehow equating, ancient and modern views on the “original fire.”

The cosmos was formed in a genesic fire: everything which was formed is a metamorphosis of fire. It was in the fiery Cloud that particles appeared, that nuclei were bonded. It was in the fury of fire that stars lit up and atoms were forged. The idea and the image of Heraclitian fire belching, rumbling, destructive, creative is surely that of the original chaos whence logos arises. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 54 – same idea p. 82)

Naturally, Morin used also concepts that had been elaborated only recently as the reinforcement or deterioration of a phenomenon through “retroaction,” “loop” and “positive [or negative] feedback.”

At this point we can already have the concept of positive retroaction intervene (positive feedback), which means accentuation/amplification/acceleration of a deviance itself. The constitution of the star is an increase of density which is increased by itself until the lighting, which triggers a counter-process. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 44)

Morin coined in the second edition of volume 1 (1980) the word “Chaosmos” to render this tight interrelation of chaos and cosmos (pp. 26, 53). His conclusion was again both a dismissal of classical physics and a clear homage to ancient Atomists. The current cosmic “order” and the apparently “universal and eternal laws” of physics were actually born from chaos, events, and singularities.

I will have the opportunity to illustrate this indefensible paradox in the old vision of the world: it is the singular and event-full character [Fr. événementialité] of the cosmos which is at the source of its universal laws! (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 46)

What is more, chaos, events and singularities were still currently happening. “Genesis [had] not stopped.” The universe was still “disintegrating and self-organizing in the same movement.”

Now, we must give in to new evidence. Genesis has not stopped. We are still in the expanding cloud. We are still in a universe where galaxies and suns are being formed. We are still in a universe which is disintegrating and self-organizing in the same movement. We are still in the beginning of a universe which has been dying since its birth. It is this permanent and working presence of chaos which we must make people see. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 55)

In this “Chaosmos,” space and time were not universal and homogeneous. Space, as it appeared through the lastest physics, had no unique “structure.” It was expanding, “polycentric” like a “drifting set of archipelagoes” and, therefore, could not be represented as a unique sidereal room.

The universe inherited from classical science was centered. The new universe is acentric, polycentric. [...] What constituted the armature and architecture of the universe becomes [a set of archipelagoes] adrift in a dispersion without structure. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 58, my mod.)

Similarly, time was not anymore determined and measured by the eternal functioning of the cosmos. It had become external to the universe which was therefore “dereified”—Morin said also ‘historicized” by comparison with human societies.

The old universe was a perfectly regulated watch. The new universe is an uncertain cloud. The old universe controlled and distilled time. The new universe is carried away by time: galaxies are products, moments in a contradictory becoming. [...] The new universe is dereified. This means not only that now everything is in process or transformation. It also means that the universe is simultaneously, perpetually in childbirth, in genesis, in decomposition. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 58)

Due to “the great meta-Copernican, meta-Newtonian revolution, which had been making its way subterraneanly from Carnot and Boltzmann to Planck, Bohr, Einstein, and Hubble,” there was neither “a center” of space nor “a non-equivocal axis of time.”

There is no longer a center of the world, be it the earth, the sun, the galaxy, a group of galaxies. There is no longer a non-equivocal axis of time, but a double, antagonistic process stemming from the same and only process. The universe is, therefore, simultaneously polycentric, acentric, decentric, disseminated, diasporating... (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 80)

The “universal order” was therefore not any longer universal. It was not “stretching out boundlessly in time and space” but had been born “in time” and “sandwiched in space.” However, if it was not any more “an absolute,” it had become “capable of development.”

Universal order, stretching out boundlessly in time and space, has henceforth been born in time, sandwiched in space between micro-physical chaos and diasapora. It is no longer general, but provincial. It is no longer unalterable, but degradable. Nevertheless, if it loses as an absolute, it gains as a process [Fr. devenir]. It is capable of development. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 73)

Like Serres, Morin thus opposed two physical paradigms supported by two ontological options that had fought against each other ever since the Antiquity. Classical modern physics, he asserted, had based itself on classical Greek thought, ie. on Plato and Aristotle, but the latter had forgotten Heraclitus and wrongly opposed Hubris (irrational excess, madness) and Dike (law, moderation, and equilibrium) (p. 57). Contrary to Serres, though, Morin did not insist on the ancient opposite view, common until the 1^st century BC, which based science on a fluid perspective but compared the world not with fire but with water. Surprisingly, he quoted Lucretius only twice in the whole book (pp. 29, 385).

Anyway, the physical nature of the world was not that described by classical physics; it was not “perpetual order, moderation, equilibrium.” On the contrary, it was composed of “irreversible movements, order mixed with disorder, expenditure, waste, imbalance.”

We must change worlds [nous devons changer de monde]. The universe inherited from Kepler, Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, Laplace was a cold, chilling universe of celestial spheres, perpetual order, of moderation, equilibrium. We must swap it for the warm universe of a flaming cloud, balls of fire, irreversible movements, of order mixed with disorder, of expenditure, waste, imbalance. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 58)

Next chapter

[1] The whole work has been republished in French in 2008 with a new preface.

Tribute to Edgar Morin and the Rhuthmoi of Nature – Part 2

Pascal Michon — 2026-05-30T04:30:00Z

Sommaire

Previous chapter

Modern Rhuthmic Theory of Becoming

Morin envisaged then the vexing theoretical problems raised by both these new ontology and new physics. What kind of concept would enable us to grasp the essentially temporal reality they were referring to? As a matter of fact, they obliged us to make “the most contradictory terms to cling together” with the danger of falling into sheer “mysticism.”

The old universe settled down into clear and distinct concepts of Determinism, Law, Being. The new universe isolates concepts, outstrips them, shatters them, obliges the most contradictory terms to cling together, in a mystic unity, without nonetheless losing their contradictions. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 58)

In order to rationally address the problem, Morin argued, we could however capitalize on the recent substitution by Prigogine of the cosmological conceptions concentrating only on entropy, as sheer loss of energy and disorganization, with more positive conceptions closely associating entropy and constructive organization, which were comparable with the two sides of the same coin (p. 67). As already noticed, Prigogine showed that entropy was not the only law to be taken into account, because there had been disorder before organization, which, consequently, was not the initial state. As a result, disorganization and organization had to be considered as parts in the same loop.

One sees that the second law considered order and organization as initial states because it did not know the preceding sequence: disorder → interaction → order/organization → disorder. [...] If there is a beginning (catastrophe), it carries in itself in an indistinct way, with its disorder, the law of order and the potentiality to organize, and cosmic history begins with the turning of the “tetralogical loop.” Thus, the law of cosmophysics is this very loop, and the sequence of the second law is inscribed in fact in the tetralogical loop, enriching and completing it. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 68)

This thread of reasoning resulted in a plain rhuthmic model of the becoming based on a succession of loops or, more accurately, on “an irreversibly spiraloid circuit” linking disorder to order and organization, and vice versa.

It is a matter, therefore, of an irreversibly spiraloid circuit, produced by the original thermic catastrophe, and which does not cease to take shape through the relation disorder/order/organization. [...] a) disorder produces order and organization (from initial constraints and interactions); b) order and organization produce disorder (from transformations). (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 69)

While, due to the second principle of thermodynamics, order was always subjected to decay, disordering and loss, disorder also acted as “a carpenter” [il est aussi charpentier] being “active everywhere.”

In fact, cosmogenesis shows us that disorder is not only dispersion, froth, slaver, and dust from the world in gestation; it is also carpentry [il est aussi charpentier]. The universe was not built only despite disorder, it was also built in and by disorder. [...] Disorder is active everywhere. It permits (fluctuations), nourishes (encounters) the constitution and the development of organized phenomena. It co-organizes and disorganizes alternately and simultaneously. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 71)

Morin formalized his model of becoming, which accompanied his ontological and physical model of “chaosmos,” with what he called “the tetralogical loop,” that is a loop linking disorder, interactions, order, and organization together.

The tetralogical loop signifies that interactions are inconceivable without disorder, that is to say without inequalities, turbulences, agitations, etc., which provoke encounters. It signifies that order and organization are inconceivable without interactions. No body, no object can be conceived outside of the interactions which have constituted it, and of the interactions in which it necessarily participates. [...] It signifies that the concepts of order and organization develop only in function of one another. Order develops only when organization creates its own determinism and makes it reign over its environment. [...] Organization needs principles of order intervening across the interactions which constitute it. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, pp. 52-53)

To describe this temporal logic Morin preferred the term “dialogic” to that of “dialectic” which he considered as a mere phenomenal expression of a deeper principle.

We need, then, a fundamental linking of the notions of order and disorder within the “tetralogue” disorder/interactions/order/organization. The fundamental linking must be of dialogic nature. I will be able to really define this term only later (v.2, ch.7); let us say here that dialogic signifies the symbiotic unity of two logics, which simultaneously nourish each other, compete against each other, live off each other, oppose and combat each other to death. I say dialogic, not to put aside the idea of dialectic, but to have it derive from it. The dialectic of order and disorder is situated at the level of phenomena; the idea of dialogic is situated at the level of principle, and already I am daring to promote it (but I will be able to demonstrate it only much later, in v.3) to the level of paradigm. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 77)

Another reason for rejecting dialectic was the domination of synthesis and ternary logic in the dialectic model since Hegel, whereas recent physics showed only permanent and endless opposition between a bunch of opposite principles with no synthesis sequence to reconcile them. Since there never were syntheses or moments of rests—as Simondon and Deleuze who underlined the necessity “to start from the middle”—Morin advocated starting “from the genesic, from chaos, namely, from the tetralogical loop.”

Given this, one can envisage a theory. It would start, not from zero, nor from the initial “point,” but from the genesic, from chaos, namely, from the tetralogical loop. It should not rest on order or disorder as on an ontological or transcendent pillar, but produce correlatively the notions of order, disorder, and organization. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 78)

This resulted in reintroducing “event-ness” or “happenings” into physics. Whereas the paradigm of classical science—“there is no science except science of the general”—obliged us to disregard singularity, the new physics was based both on an original “Happening” and on “cascades of happenings”—as if physics had been entirely historicized.

The old universe had no singularity in its obedience to general laws, it had no event-ness [Fr. évémentialité] in its repetitive clockwork movements, no play in its inflexible determinism... The Universe which is born here is singular even in its general character. [...] This universe a-borning [cet univers naissant] is born in Happening and is generated in cascades of happenings. Happenings, triply excommunicated by classical science (since it was simultaneously singular, aleatory, and concrete), re-enters by the cosmic front door. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 81)

In the general conclusion of the book, Morin underlined again the fundamental “event-ness” or “temporality” of the universe. Interestingly, in this instance, he cited Whitehead's philosophy of process.

The universe produces its general laws from its own particularity. It is an enriched universe: matter is not the ultimate essence of this universe, it is an aspect, which takes on consistency with organization. It is a reanimated universe, moving, acting, transforming, becoming. There is nothing in the universe which is not temporal; there is no element whatsoever, from the particle to the most stable component of a stable system, which cannot be conceived of as event, that is to say as something which happens, is transformed, disappears. The cosmos itself is an Event, which continues its course in cascades of events in which particles arose, atoms were formed, in which suns light up, stars die, life is born. All active organization is an interlacing of events which disorganize and reorganize. Communicational/ informational organization is made up of only of events which it produces, captures, utilizes, resurrects... Event, as Whitehead says, is the [unit] of real things. It is the concrete [unit] which nature gives, not the abstract [unit] which measurement gives. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, pp. 375-376, my mod.)

Moreover, whereas classical physics had considered time as “reversible,” in the sense that any given physical phenomenon could always be undone and taken back to its initial state, the new physics introduced the idea that time was actually “irreversible” since the things populating the universe as well as the universe itself could not be taken back to their initial states. “Everything was born” and “Matter ha[d] a history.” A few pages below: “There is an evolution of matter” (p. 134).

Physical order was unaware of the irreversibility of time until the second law of thermodynamics. Cosmic order was unaware of the irreversibility of time until 1965, when the universe entered into becoming. The eternity of the Laws of Nature was thus liquidated. There is no more frozen physis. Everything was born, everything appeared, everything began, once upon a time. Matter has a history. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 81)

Yet, this history should not be conceived in a neo-idealist way. Morin noticed that “the favorable hypothesis” suggested by the philosopher and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) according to which the universe developed its own richness only in an ascensional way, was one-sided and incomplete. Actually, order and organization had occurred, and still occurred, at a tremendously expensive cost. “Destruction and dispersion,” “fruitless expenses” and “useless agitations” were largely dominant features of the universe, while organization was utterly exceptional.

There is hemorrhage, waste, mess of which we must be conscious. The encounters produce more destruction and dispersion than organization. To constitute an organization, erect an order, keep a life alive, so many “useless” agitations, so many “fruitless” expenses, so many squandered energies, so many dispersive hemorrhages are needed! (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 83)

In fact, both kinds of history, the dispersive one derived from the second law of thermodynamics, and the ascensional one inspired by biological evolution, should be thought of as belonging to the same physical reality. The two perspectives, which were both born around the middle of the 19^th century, should be associated.

Now, each of these two times had arisen at the same moment, in the middle of the nineteenth century. The first, that of the second law, drew physis toward degradation, the first rumble announcing the great cosmic diaspora. The second, on the contrary, was that of ascensional evolution, or progress. It had penetrated society since 1789 and burst upon biology. (Darwin. The Origin of Species. 1859) But biological time was going inversely to entropic time, and as they had each arisen in a sphere hermetically closed to the other. [...] Now, we can finally break the schizophrenia between these two times which are unaware of and flee each other. They are simultaneously one, complementary, concurrent, and antagonistic. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 84)

As we shall see, the existence of “organizations,” biological as well as physical, was based simultaneously on stabilizing cycles and loops, irreversible transformations, and unexpected events. This meant that the historical time of the universe was in fact, as in Bachelard's view, “syncretic” or “complex” (p. 83).

To this already very complex time, we will have to integrate, when we examine the problem of organization, the time of reiterations, repetitions, loops, cycles, repeated beginnings, and we will see that these repetitive times are nourished and contaminated by irreversible time (cf. Part II, ch.2), just as they are perturbed by event-full time: their movement is always spiraloid and always subject to the risk of rupture... The great time of Becoming is syncretic. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 84)

Later in the book (part 2, chap. 2, sec. IV), Morin elaborated further this first view with a few considerations drawn from what he called the “fundamental dynamism” of the cosmos and its population by “active organizations.” Contrary to what most philosophers claimed, he first noticed, time was not only an incessant irreversible flow. It contained both the notion of passing and that of recursion. It was both “sequential” and “looping,” “irreversible and circular.”

Time is part of the internal definition of all active organization. Activity is clearly a phenomenon in time. But time, from the moment it introduces itself into active organization, becomes bifid, dissociates itself at entry into two times without ceasing to remain the same time and finds itself again at exit. It is sequential time, which in fact imbues and pervades the system, and it is the time of the loop which recloses on itself. This is to say that time is doubly part of the definition of active organization since it is both irreversible and circular time. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 213)

The result of this double movement was not any longer linear but “spiral-like.”

The unity of this double yet single time, associated yet dissociated, is like spiral movement, simultaneously irreversible and circular, returning on itself, biting its tail, closing itself up continuously in its re-opening, re-beginning itself continuously in its flow. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 214)

Second, Morin emphasized, this double “spiral time” was constantly interrupted by “accidents, perturbations, lapses,” i.e. “chopped up by a thousand small, worrisome events.”

This spiral time is fragile because it is tied to physical improbability and because it is at the mercy of ecological dependence. It is not the time of clockwork rigor [...] The time of the regenerative loop knows accidents, perturbations, lapses, which continuously threaten being and existence. This is to say that spiral time hauls in itself event-full [Fr. événementiel] time. It is chopped up by a thousand small, worrisome events. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 214)

Morin's conclusion was thus the same as in the first part of the book when he referred to a “syncretic” or “complex” time of Becoming. These three forms constituted “complementary, concurrent, and antagonistic times,” which together formed “the Time of life” (p. 215). In living beings, but also in societies, this complex structure of time appeared from the play between: 1. internal degradation and disorganization, aphazard external perturbations; 2. negative retroactions, regulation, intended to cope with these disorganizations and perturbations; 3. positive retroactions (accentuation, amplification, acceleration of a process by itself on itself) which could “play a genesic role.”

We are going to see that, in the biological sphere, and especially in the anthropo-social sphere, positive retroaction, while remaining disorganizing but also because it is disorganizing, can play a genesic role, namely create diversity, newness, complexity. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 218)

In the general conclusion of the book, Morin came back once more to this view. Time was not sheer “degradation, progress, sequence nor perpetual cycle” but “rich and complex” which meant “complementary, concurrent, and antagonistic.”

The universe of old physics could not cope with time, or rather, time could bring it nothing but degradation. The new universe is consubstantial with a rich and complex time: it is neither the simple time of degradation, nor the simple time of progress, nor the simple time of sequence, nor the simple time of perpetual cycle. It is, in a way simultaneously complementary, concurrent, and antagonistic, all of these diverse times, while still remaining the Same. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 376)

Modern Rhuthmic Theory of Individuation

As we saw, Morin's theory of becoming culminated in a theory of individuation he called “organization.” Disorder allowed interactions, which allowed in turn the emergence of local pockets of order and organization. The organizations, i.e. the beings, the existing things, were thus based both on a certain internal order “intervening across the interactions which consitute[d] [them]” and a certain external rule “over [their] environment” (p. 53). Naturally, the emergence of organizations caused in turn new disorder in the environment, which allowed new interactions, etc.

To specify what he meant by the term “organization,” Morin started from the concept of “system” as it had rapidly emerged in various sciences since the 1900s to oppose both the traditional views naively derived from architecture and the newest views based on sheer dispersion and probability. In micro-physics, he recalled, the particle lost all substance, all distinction, and was now defined only by “the interactions in which it participated,” and, when it was part of an atom, by “the interactions which [wove] the organization of this atom” (p. 95). It was “a Gordian knot of interactions and exchanges” (p. 95). Therefore, “the particles [had] the properties of the system much more than the system [had] the properties of the particles” (p. 95 – Morin's italics). The atom thus became the model of an “organized object or system.”

Since then, the atom steps forward as a new object, the organized object or system whose explanation can no longer be found solely in the nature of its elementary components, but is found also in its organizational and systemic nature, which transforms the characteristics of the components. [...] we see that the universe is founded, not on an indivisible unity but on a complex system! (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 95)

The same revolution had occurred in astro-physics which did not limit itself any longer to one solar system moved by a clockwork rotation of the planets around the sun, but discovered “myriads of sun-systems, organizing sets which self-maintain[ed] by spontaneous regulations” (p. 96). Similarly, modern biology introduced the idea of system to replace both the idea of living matter and that of vital principle, that had become obsolete, and give a more satisfactory account of the cell or the organism (p. 96). Finally, right from the start, sociology considered society as a system, in the strong sense of an organizing whole irreducible to its components, the individuals (p. 96).

While the Universe itself, due to its ongoing expansion and dislocation, could certainly not be seen as a system (p. 65), the concept well applied to the innumerable “islands and archipelagoes” that had formed ever since the big bang, including living organisms and human societies. The universe was “an astonishing architecture of systems.”

All the key objects of physics, biology, sociology, astronomy, atoms, molecules, cells, organisms, societies, stars, and galaxies constitute systems. Outside systems, there is only particle dispersion. Our organized world is an archipelago of systems in the ocean of disorder. All that was object has become system. All that was even an elementary unit, including and especially the atom, has become system. We find in nature masses, aggregates of systems, unorganized flows of organized objects. But what is remarkable is the polysystemic character of the organized universe. The latter is an astonishing architecture of systems built one on the other, one between the other, one against the other, implicating and dovetailing one with the other, in a grand game of masses, plasmas, fluids of micro-systems circulating, floating, enveloping the architectures of systems. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 96)

Similarly, “Nature” constituted an “extraordinary solidarity of mortised systems.”

The phenomenon is what we call Nature, which is nothing but extraordinary solidarity of mortised systems [systèmes enchevêtrés – entangled] building one on the other, by the other, with the other, against the other: Nature is systems of systems in chaplets, clusters, polyps, bushes, archipelagoes. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 97, my mod. – same idea p. 107)

According to Morin, systemic phenomena had thus become evident everywhere during the 20^th century, but the concept of system itself had not been satisfactorily elaborated. Even Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901-1972) in his General System Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications (1968) had not gone far enough. The biologist had rightly chosen holism over reductionism, but he had not pursued the paradoxical nature of complex unity. We had to go even beyond holism and reach to the organizational circuit.

Quite remarkably, Morin then referred to Ferdinand de Saussure's definition in his Course in General Linguistic (notes from 1906 to 1911 published in 1916) as one of the best and the earliest one, since it introduced for the first time the idea of organization. We must here give credit to Morin to have recognized, against most of his contemporaries including deconstructionists, that Saussure was not a “structuralist” but a “systematist” and to, consequently, have half-opened a path between his own implicitly rhuthmic theory of complexity and the explicitly rhuthmic theory of language that was emerging since the 1950s with Benveniste and more recently Meschonnic, as we will see in another chapter.

Finally, the definition of Ferdinand de Saussure (who was a systematist rather that a structuralist) is particularly well articulated and evokes [fait surgir – brings out] especially the concept of organization by linking it to that of totality and interrelation: the system is “an organized totality, made up of interdependent elements holding together and not able to be defined except one by the other in function of their place in this totality.” (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 99, my mod.)

Limited to the sub-concepts of totality and interrelation, the concept of system was insufficient, though. It had to be enriched with that of organization, that is to be dynamized and endowed with a genuinely generative aspect.

In fact, it is not sufficient to associate interrelation and totality; one must tie totality to interrelation by the idea of organization. In other words, as soon as the interrelations between elements, events, or individuals have a regular or stable character, they become organizational and constitute [a “whole” – un tout]. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 99, my mod.)

Whereas a system was merely a “global organized unity of interrelations between elements, actions, or individuals” (p. 99, my trans.), the organization was the “arrangement of these interrelations” which “produced and reproduced” the system. The organization was a self-organizing unity.

Organization is the arrangement of relations between components or individuals which produces a complex unity or system, endowed with qualities unknown at the level of components or individuals. Organization interrelationally ties [note: by fixed and rigid dependences, by active interrelations or organizational interactions, by regulatory retroactions, by informational communications] diverse elements, events, or individuals which henceforth become the components of a whole. It assures relative solidarity and solidity to these ties, thus assures the system a certain possibility of duration despite chance perturbations. Organization, therefore: transforms, produces, binds, maintains. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 101)

However, Morin did not want to hierarchize the two concepts which had to be thought of as parts in the same loop, which moreover should include that of interrelations.

My aim here is to associate them, since system is the phenomenal and global character which interrelations take, whose arrangement constitutes the organization of the system. The two concepts are tied by that of interrelations: any interrelation endowed with some stability or regularity takes on an organizational character and produces a system. There is, therefore, a circular reciprocity among these three terms: interrelation, organization, system. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 101)

In order to clarify, as much as possible, the functioning of this loop, Morin elaborated in the following sections the concept of “unitas multiplex” or “organized complex unity” (p. 102-112).

The fact that a system was made up of elements linked to each other through an organization that regulated their interactions resulted, first, in a series of positive consequences. The arrangement produced the “emergence” of new properties at the level of the whole as well as of the parts.

We can call emergences the qualities or properties of a system which present a character of newness in respect to the qualities or properties of the constituents considered separately or arranged differently in another type of system. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, pp. 103-104)

The concept of “emergence” was important since it denoted, simultaneously, the production of radically new beings or properties, that is some sort of “events” (p. 105), and some degrees of tiering within each system, “the emergent qualities rise one on the other, the heads of some becoming the feet of others” (p. 108).

On the one hand, whether for atoms, molecules, or human societies, “the whole was always more than the sum of its parts” (p. 103). Quoting from Serres, Morin underlined the significance of the phenomenon of emergence for understanding the nature of no less than matter, life, language, and humankind. He also alluded, a few pages below, to “consciousness” (p. 108).

It is quite remarkable that the apparently elementary notions that are matter, life, meaning, humanity, correspond in fact to the emergent qualities of systems. (Serres, 1976, p. 276) (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 104)

But on the other hand, the parts were also much more than isolated parts. They were transformed and enriched by their existence within the whole. Individual aptitudes for “language, craftsmanship, and art,” for instance, were the result of positive retroaction of the whole upon the parts.

In human society, with the constitution of culture, individuals develop their aptitudes for language, craftsmanship, art, that is to say that their richest individual qualities emerge within the social system. Thus, we see systems where macro-emergences retroact as micro-emergences on the parts. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 105)

However, Morin was very critical of the substitution of a certain “reductionist blindness (which sees only the constitutive elements)” with a no less limiting “holistic blinding (which sees only the whole)” (p. 109). He particularly targeted here von Bertalanffy whom he reproached for not seeing clearly the central role of organization and complexity in systems.

Systems theory has reacted to reductionism, in and by “holism” or the idea of the “whole.” But, believing to go beyond reductionism, holism has in fact brought about a reduction on the whole: whence, not only its blindness on the parts insofar as parts, but its myopia on organization insofar as organization, its ignorance of the complexity at the heart of global unity. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 110)

Similarly as strict individualist methods, strict holism had to be overcome. In fact, systems induced also negative consequences. Each particular arrangement imposed new “constraints” and caused losses in the whole as much as in the parts.

The internal determinism, the roles, the regularities, the subordination of components to the whole, the adjustment of the complementaries, the specializations, the retroaction of the whole, the stability of the whole, and, in living systems, the mechanisms of regulation and control, systemic order in a word, are translated into so many constraints. Every association implies constraints: constraints exercised by parts interdependent one on the other, constraints of the parts on the whole, constraints of the whole on the parts. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 110)

So, a system was a “complex unity” where components were held together while remaining distinct by their function, but also abandoning themselves to the organization to ensure their sustainability. The system was only viable if the parts enjoyed sufficient room for their own action but also if the gregarious forces were stronger than the dissipative forces. It was thus based on tense loops linking its various levels or on active antagonisms.

Every system whose organization is active is in fact a system where antagonisms are active. Regulations suppose a minimum of antagonisms on guard [qu'elles refoulent – that they repress]. Retroaction which maintains the constancy of a system or regulates a performance is called negative (negative feed-back), a very enlightening term: triggered by the variation of an element, it tends to annul this variation. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 118, my mod.)

Actually the systemic constraints were so powerful that they resulted in the repression of important characters which remained obscure but always capable to reemerge if the opportunity was given to them. This was, Morin commented, the lesson given by Marx and Freud concerning the social and psychic unconscious (p. 125).

While emergences develop into phenomenal qualities of systems, organizational constraints immerge in a world of silence the characters inhibited, repressed, compressed at the level of parts. Every system includes, thus, its immerged, secret, obscure zone where suppressed virtualities stir. The duality between the immerged and the emergent, the virtualized and the actualized, the repressed and the expressed is a source of scissions and dissociations in great living and social polysystems. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 124, my mod.)

But the role of constraints entailed also a second characteristic. There were naturally various degrees of complexity from the lowest in “crystal groups,” mobilizing only similar and distinct components, to the highest in “living organisms,” composed of “billions of cells which remain differentiated, diversified, and individualized (possessing organizing autonomy)” (p. 113). Thus, every increase in complexity implied “an increase in variety” as much as “a more supple and complex direction” based, for instance, “on inter-communication and not on coercion.”

As I see it, every increase in complexity is translated by an increase in variety within a system; this increase, which tends to dispersion in the type of organization where it is produced, requires thenceforth a transformation of organization in a more supple and complex direction. The development of complexity requires, therefore, both a greater richness in diversity and a greater richness in unity (which will be founded for example on inter-communication and not on coercion). (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 114)

Morin's conclusion concerning the concepts of system and organization could be, once again, compared to Lucretius' theory of individuation, despite the time distance. Quite like, according to Lucretius, a building could stand and resist decay because of the tiny angles its apparently straight architecture was based on, systems could persist in their being thanks to the active antagonisms they were, so to speak, riding. Just as Lucretius' “building” was a dynamic cone where myriads of contrary fluxes reached for a time equilibrium, Morin's “organized complex system” was based on active internal looping antagonisms. This meant, based on the latest science, reactualizing the peculiar concept of equilibrium by disequilibrium, which, one remembers, allowed Lucretius to bridge the divide between Heraclitus and Parmenides, between flow and form, without depending for individuation on Plato's solution by “participation to ideal Forms.”

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Tribute to Edgar Morin and the Rhuthmoi of Nature – Part 3

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Modern Rhuthmic Theory of Knowledge

As Lucretius, Morin finally proposed, at the end of the first part of his book, a theory of knowledge. Not unlike his forebear, who based his own theory on the association between passive perception of fluxes of infinitesimal simulacra and active recognition of the shapes they enveloped, he based his knowledge theory on a cross-involvement between “system perception” and “system conception.” What was new, however, besides the concept of system, was the use of the concept of loop to formalize this cross-involvement.

Against both “naive realism which takes a system as a real object” and “naive nominalism which takes a system for an ideal schema,” and their respective elimination of the subject or the object (p. 140), Morin proposed to associate them through a recurrent circuit going from “the observed system” to “the observer-system” and back.

Thus, the observation and the study of a system link physical organization and the organization of ideas to each other in systemic terms. The observed system, and consequently the organized physis of which it is a part, and the observer-system, and consequently the anthropo-social organization of which it is a part, become interrelationed in a critical manner: the observer is also a part of the definition of the observed system, and the observed system is also a part of the intellect and culture of the observer-system. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 141, my mod.)

Morin here alluded to the possibility to establish by this circular or, better, spiraloid process a “new systemic totality” which could become “a metasystem in reference to both.” But he immediately added, recognizing that this perspective was remote, “if it is possible however to find the meta-point of view.”

The new systemic totality which is constituted by associating the system-observed and the observer-system can, thenceforth, become metasystem in reference to both, if it is possible however to find the meta-point of view, which allows us to observe the set constituted by the observer and his observation. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 141, my mod.)

In his introduction, the translator Joseph Lucien Roland Bélanger (1925-2010), a Marist catholic priest, compared many times Morin's materialist evolutionism, quite wrongly as a matter of fact, to Teilhard de Chardin's grand evolutionism, but he was closer to the truth concerning his theory of knowledge.

Although Morin did not know anything about hermeneutics, Bélanger noticed, he was in fact close to the conclusions reached recently, on Heideggerian ontological basis, by Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002). Wahrheit und Methode – Truth and Method had been published in German in 1960 and translated into French in 1976. We could add that he was even closer, as we will see, to the conclusions reached, on more philological basis, by Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) at the beginning of the 19^th century.

To put it in a nutshell, according to hermeneutics theoreticians, interpretation, whether of the Being or, less speculatively, of the Bible, needed constant loopings between the Dasein's or reader's “interpretations” and the “answers” given by the Being or the Text. The Cartesian “Method,” with its linear chains of reasons, had to be replaced by the back-and-forth of a “conversation” or by a spiraloid approach to “Truth.”

We must not give in to simplifications like idealizing or rationalizing or standardizing. There can be no linearity, only the spiral. [NN21f] Though there is no forthright mention at this point of two of the most prominent philosophical theorists of knowledge in our time, Michel Foucault or Hans Georg Gadamer, Morin clearly, in his categorical rejection of a dichotomy between object and subject, stands against Foucaldian “archeology” and for Gadamerian hermeneutics. (Translator's Introduction, J.-L. Roland Bélanger, in Method, 1992, p. xx)

However, because he speculated from a poor concept of language limited by his prioritarily ontological reflection, Gadamer concluded that since human understanding was part of inescapable loops, it allowed no exterior and overlooking viewpoint to emerge and that absolute truth was therefore unreachable. All knowledge was subjective or, at least, supported by grand collective movements of meaning that Gadamer called Wirkungsgeschichte – Effective History. As Bélanger recalled, for Gadamer, “understanding is always an interpretation” (quoted p. xxix) (on Gadamer's limitations, see Michon, 2000 and 2010a, chap. 7). And it is true that Morin sometimes indulged in this new sophisticated kind of deconstruction of science. In a following section dedicated to information, he wrote for instance, as Bélanger rightly noticed: “The real takes on substance, form, and meaning only under the form of messages which an observer/conceiver interprets. We have only translations of reality, never the original version [jamais la v.o.]” (p. 363).

Nevertheless, Morin also affirmed the possibility of finding a “meta-systemic point of view” that could bridge “the polysystemic group constituted by the conceiver-subject and his anthropo-social grounding,” and “the polysystemic group constituted by the object-system and its physical grounding.” He never accepted sheer subjectivism nor relativism, and he would have been very much opposed—had he known about it—to the subtle version lately proposed by Gadamer under the cloak of a radically temporalized ontology.

We can and must also go beyond in the search for a meta-systemic point of view: we can no longer escape the key epistemological problem which is the relation between, on one hand the polysystemic group constituted by the conceiver-subject and his anthropo-social grounding, on the other hand the polysystemic group constituted by the object-system and its physical grounding. Henceforth, it is a question of elaborating the meta-system of reference from which we might embrace simultaneously both groups which could communicate and interorganize therein. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 142)

If Morin's theory of knowledge shared some features with hermeneutics, it was rather with Schleiermacher's brand, who had, thanks to his philological approach and despite he was living at the beginning of the 19^th century, a much more precise and accurate knowledge of language than Gadamer, who in his book rarely talked of literature and knew nothing about modern linguistics. Whereas Gadamer, when describing the relation between Dasein and Being, used the term “conversation” as a vague metaphor, Schleiermacher used it, to describe his relation to the Bible text, in a much more proper sense as intertwining of two discourses.

As Schleiermacher who believed that modern readers could rightly understand the Bible, provided they read it carefully and recursively, because they share with ancient writers the same language capacity endowed by God, Morin thought that “the organizing retroaction of our anthropo-social understanding on the physical world,” i.e. progressive adequation between scientific discourse and physis, was made possible by their “preliminary organizational homology,” i.e. their similar systemic nature, based on their common evolutionary history.

The systemic articulation which is established between the anthropo-social universe and the physical universe, via the concept of system, suggests to us that an organizational character is fundamentally common to all systems. The possibility of posing, in systemic terms, the organization of physis as well as the organization of knowledge, supposes a preliminary organizational homology. This homology would allow the organizing retroaction of our anthropo-social understanding on the physical world, an understanding which has come about by evolution. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 142)

Thus, the concept of system, reshuffled through the concepts of interrelation, organization, loop between parts and whole, and antagonism, was an evolutionary universal mediator between physical, living, and human spheres, which allowed true knowledge.

[It is] a reading guide for all phenomena of physical, biological, anthropological, ideological, organization, including the theoretical system which I am beginning to elaborate here. This pilot-definition, concerning the common denominator of everything organized, has, therefore, universal value. System is, therefore, conceived here as the basic complex concept concerning organization. It is, if we may say so, the most simple complex concept. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 147-148)

Much further down in the book, Morin elaborated further this idea. World and mind were not opposed but were actually involved in a permanent loop.

This rotation leads us to physicalize our notions, then to socialize them, then to rephysica1ize them, then to resocialize them, then to rephysicalize them, then to resocialize them, and so on ad infinitum. It seems to us that this is not a vicious circle, but a productive praxis. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 288)

Rather than pose the problem in terms of the alternative idea/matter, we can attempt to bind these two antagonistic propositions in a loop: physical configurations – symbolic configurations. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 366)

The spiraloid movement of knowledge between observer and world, which forbid any “reflection” theory, resulted however in “a possible correspondence and translation” between the “physical play” of matter and the “psychic play,” that is two fluxes: that of the world and that of the thought.

In order to understand the correspondence between the organization of knowledge [Fr. connaissance] and the knowledge [Fr. connaissance] of organization, [...] it is no longer a matter of looking for the “reflection” of the real in the mind of the observer, nor for the “reflection” of the mind in the real: the organization of knowledge [Fr. connaissance] is perhaps a translation of, but not the “reflection” of, physical organization. This principle of equivalence can only be truly conceived if we conceive physis according to the fundamental “tetralogical” relation disorder/interaction/order/organization. From that moment on, there is a possible correspondence and translation between the physical [play]: disorder/interaction/order/organization (physical) and the psychic [play]: noise/information/redundancy/organization (psychic). (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, pp. 359-360, my mod.)

This possible correspondence between the two fluxes, psychic and physical, was actually allowed by their common temporal organization or their common way of flowing. Both, Morin claimed, were involving the same chain of basic elements—noise corresponded to disorder, redundancy to order, information to play of interaction, theories to organization—and the same kind of concatenation.

Thus, for the observer, noise is ignorance psychically (and thereby unknown, mysterious) and disorder physically; for the observer, redundancy is certainty psychically and order physically (invariance, law, repetition, pattern, regularity, stability); for the observer, information is knowledge [Fr. savoir] psychically acquired from events, understanding [Fr. connaissance] extracted from noise, and it is physically the event-full and diversely haphazard play of the interactions. And, just as physical play finds and produces its organization in physical systems, psychic play finds and produces its organization in theoretical systems. Just as there are, in the physical tetralogue, unceasing permutations and transformations (organization in disorder, disorder in organization, etc.) so in the tetralogue of ideas, noise/redundancy/information/systems, there are permutations and transformations: information is born from interactions between organization and noise, gives birth to redundancy at the heart of an ad hoc organization, dies in noise like this organization itself. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 360)

Knowledge was thus progressing through the “redistribution of redundancy, of information, of noise” (p. 360) but, due to the laws revealed by Brillouin, “an exhaustive observation [would] necessitate infinite information, which [would] necessitate infinite energy” (p. 362). This resulted in limiting human knowledge based not any more on the structure of subjectivity, as for Kant, but on the relation between the information and the energy that was needed to produce it.

Knowledge [Fr. connaissance] carried to the absolute is self-destructive. This proposition holds for every observation, every science, concerning every object, every phenomenon, every being, and of course, the universe as a whole. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 363)

Modern Rhuthmic Theory of Form

This leads us, finally, to Morin's theory of form. Unsurprisingly, as Lucretius and Serres, he explicitly rejected both Platonic and Aristotelian theories. Forms were not “essences” nor “mold[s] sculpturing the identity of the objects from the outside” (same idea p. 369). Forms were the “totality of the complex organized unit” once “manifested phenomenally” as a whole “in time and space.”

The object is no longer an essence-form and/or a substance-matter. There is no longer any form mold which sculptures the identity of the object from the outside. The idea of form is preserved, but transformed: form is the totality of the complex organized unit which is manifested phenomenally insofar as whole in time and space. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 121)

As both Lucretius and Serres, Morin conceived of form as product of processes of individuation based on the interaction of the internal dynamism of a particular complex unit and the constraints of its environment. No longer “essence,” form became “an idea of existence and organization.”

The Gestalt form is the product of catastrophes, of interrelations/interactions between elements, of internal organization, of the conditions, pressures, constraints of the environment. Form ceases to be an idea of essence in order to become an idea of existence and organization. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 121)

Form was therefore a byproduct of organization both as a “morphogenetic” process, transforming “a discrete diversity into a global form (Gestalt),” and as a “morphostatic” functioning, an “ordering principle which insure[d] permanence.”

Organization is both transformation and formation (morphogenesis). It is really a matter of transformations: elements transformed into the parts of a whole lose some qualities and gain new ones; organization transforms a discrete diversity into a global form (Gestalt). It creates a continuum—the interrelationed whole—where there was the discontinuous; thereby it brings about a change of form: it forms (a whole) starting from the transformation (of the elements). It is really a matter of morphogenesis: organization gives form, in space and time, to a new reality: complex unity or system. [...] Organization is, at the same time, the ordering principle which insures permanence. Permanence in the being of atoms, molecules, heavenly bodies does not correspond to inertia but to active organization. Organization is morphostatic: it maintains the permanence of the system in its form (Gestalt), its existence, its identity. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 128)

But that was not all. Actually, this initial description was valid only for “closed systems,” that is, the rare ones that did not effect exchanges with the outside. Yet, most were “open systems” which effected material, energetic and/or informational exchanges with the outside. Consequently, the concept had to be completed to fit this complex situation: form was thus the result of the looping interactions between morphogenetic process and morphostatic functioning, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the environment dynamics. It thus resulted from a relentless “re-form” activity. In other words, in those cases, the form was properly in a fluid state. Although it maintained a certain consistency, it was ceaselessly “re-forming.”

Active organizations of systems called open insure the exchanges, the transformations which nourish and effect their own survival: the opening allows them to ceaselessly [re-form] themselves [à se re-former sans cesse]; they are [re-formed] [ils se re-forment] by closing, by multiple loops, negative retroactions, recursive uninterrupted cycles. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 133, my mod.)

Morin was here very close to the ancient idea of rhuthmos as “particular manner of flowing.” Each system had a specific form that was actually determined by its randomly acquired specific way to re-produce itself through its exchanges with the environment, a way that Morin called, for the time being, “qualities,” and that he was soon to call “self of the system.”

We must also, given the improbability and ever greater fragility of what becomes complex, understand evolution starting from the consolidation of fragility and improbability in and by organizational order, in and by the acquisition of emergent qualities (among them, more subtle organizational qualities, more and more apt to resolve phenomenal problems), in and by the aptitude to form organizational relations with other systems. Thus, the universe of organization, born by chance encounters, is maintained by order, necessity, but also qualities, making what otherwise should have been dissolved and dispersed survive and perdure. (Method, vol. 1, 1977, trans. J.-L. Roland Bélanger, 1992, p. 135)

On the whole, Morin's theory of knowledge and theory of form were consistent with his ontology, his physics, his model of becoming, and his theory of individuation: they were de facto rhuthmic theories based, as all other parts of his thought, on “recurrent spiraloid loops.” But they only indirectly alluded to “specific ways of flowing” whose concept was not yet completely elaborated. Contrary to Serres', the concept of rhuthmos was absent of his reflection. Remarkably, though, Morin did not stop at these first conclusions. He developed a full theory of “dynamic organization” that was his particular way of addressing the very same issue. Let us see now how far he went in this direction.

As the reader may have noticed, up to now Morin's reflection covered exactly the same subjects as Serres'—and it is not merely an artifact of my presentation. Moreover, his perspective was often very close, if not similar, to the Ancient materialist thought brilliantly revealed by Serres. For both reasons, we may legitimately consider Morin not only as a member of the rhythmic constellation of the 1970s-1980s but also as one of the most articulate contributors to an emerging rhuthmic worldview. Probably without realizing it, Morin was part of a powerful but unnoticed trend.

Next chapter

Giacinto Scelsi – Quatuor N° 4

2026-05-27T05:00:00Z

Joey Alexander – Lush Life (2015)

2026-05-25T12:00:00Z

Tōru Takemitsu – Distance de fée (1951)

2026-05-21T11:23:26Z

Sayaka Shoji, violon

Jean-Frédéric Neuburger, piano

The tyranny of clock time ? Debating fatigue in the US truck driving industry

Benjamin H. Snyder — 2026-05-10T05:00:00Z

This very interesting article, originally published in Time & Society vol. 28.2, 2019, was brought to my attention by Leo Singer of the University of Liverpool. It can be accessed freely on SageJournals or on SageJournals.pdf.

Abstract : Social theorists frequently claim that clock time—a cold, mechanical, and intensifying culture of time reckoning—has the tendency to dominate “process time”—a warm, humane, and leisurely culture of time-reckoning. This article interrogates this “tyranny of clock time” narrative through an in-depth examination of the fatigue debate in the US truck driving industry. I find that trucking regulators use clock time to encourage rest and recovery. Drivers, meanwhile, are committed to process time in ways that encourage intensification and overwork. Process time culture involves its own forms of time discipline that are related to power, exploitation, and overwork in surprising ways. Yet even though the normative ends of the two time orientations are reversed in this case, I still find that clock time is tyrannical in a certain limited sense. Clock time disrupts the rhythms of the labor process leading to work scenarios that drivers find fatiguing. In their efforts to use clock time to regulate fatigue, then, trucking regulators have actually created new kinds of fatigue. The tyranny of clock time narrative is thus challenged and supported in ways that refine our understanding of both clock time and process time. The distinction between clock time—a highly quantitative conception of time focused on abstract and decontextualized measurement—and process time—a more qualitative conception of time focused on the concrete rhythms of social activities, bodies, and the natural environment—has been foundational to the social analysis of time. Scholars have drawn this distinction in myriad ways and have long found it useful for understanding differences in ways of “doing” time. One of the most enduring claims arising from this distinction is that clock time is tyrannical toward process time. Clock time is cold, mechanical, and empty. It alienates us from the natural environment, encourages the hyper-rationalization of social life, and intensifies labor. Process time, by contrast, is warm, organic, and alive. It is a more humane temporal culture that encourages rest, recovery, and playful spontaneity. Scholars frequently argue that, when they are pitted against each other, clock time tends to “triumph” over process time. This “tyranny of clock time” narrative is pervasive in social theory and lies at the heart of many of the most compelling critiques of modernity (Giddens, 1995 ; Lukacs, 1971 ; Marx, 1955 ; Postone, 1996 ; Thompson, 1967).

In this paper, I interrogate the tyranny of clock time narrative by grounding it in a concrete empirical case—the US truck driving industry—a context in which the proper management of time is a matter of life and death, and clock time, in the form of drivers' work schedules, is seen as both cause of and solution to the industry's notorious health and safety problems. I focus on a period of heightened debate about work time and driver fatigue, which occurred between 2010 and 2013. Through an in-depth examination of this debate, I document how two cultures of time have developed within the truck driving industry : a clock time culture practiced by regulators, and a process time culture favored by drivers and other industry insiders. I show that, contrary to theoretical assumptions, it is regulators' clock time culture that is allied to norms of rest, recovery, and a more humane relationship to bodily fatigue, while drivers' process time culture encourages intensification and overwork, thus confounding the typical formulation of these concepts. In yet another complication, however, I ultimately find that regulator's clock time culture is indeed tyrannical in a certain limited sense. It tends to disrupt drivers' ability to fully commit to process time, resulting in work scenarios that drivers find fatiguing. The resulting picture, then, both contradicts and supports the tyranny of clock time narrative in complex ways.

Temporal cultures

Temporal cultures are grounded in what Glennie and Thrift (2009) call communities of temporal practice—groups that share similar ideas, skills, and technologies related to temporal reckoning. Social theorists typically divide temporal cultures into two ideal types, which for the sake of simplicity I call “clock time” and “process time.” This framework has ancient roots, such as the distinction between Chronos and Kairos in the Greek rhetorical tradition (Kinneavy, 2002), and has been reformulated by contemporary scholars in dozens of ways (e.g., Adam, 1990 : 30). Postone, for example, uses the words “abstract” and “concrete.” Abstract time refers to “uniform, continuous, homogeneous, ‘empty' time” and is thus marked by “equal, constant, nonqualitative units” (Postone, 1996 : 202). Concrete time, by contrast, refers to “various sorts of time that are functions of events : they are referred to, and understood through, natural cycles and the periodicities of human life as well as particular tasks and processes” (Postone, 1996 : 201). Whatever the specific terms, scholars draw this distinction in order to describe two ideal typical ways of “doing” time. Whereas the more abstract clock time perspective assumes action is best planned ahead of time, the more concrete and embodied process time perspective assumes “things take the amount of time they need to take” (Davies, 1994 : 279). [...]

Castoriadis critique de Heidegger

Claude Helbling & Olivier Fressard — 2026-04-30T05:00:00Z

Cela fait maintenant plusieurs années que je regrette de ne jamais avoir eu le temps de pénétrer plus profondément dans l'œuvre et la pensée de Cornelius Castoriadis, dont certains aspects rappellent fortement celles de ses contemporains de la « Constellation rythmique ». En guise d'ouverture de ce dossier, voici une présentation extrêmement claire des critiques portées par Castoriadis à la pensée de Heidegger et de tous ses suiveurs plus ou moins inspirés, en particulier en France, à quoi les auteurs ont ajouté un ensemble de textes choisis où Castoriadis rentre dans les détails. Il y a certainement là la base d'une analyse rythmologique de son œuvre, qui reste entièrement à faire. Avis aux amateurs. On trouvera ci-joint une bibliographie de et sur Castoriadis établie par Claude Helbling que je remercie au passage de me l'avoir transmise. – PM.

Ces textes ont été publiés dans la revue Texto ! Textes et cultures, vol. XXVIII, n°2-3 (2023).

Version augmentée (en extraits) de l'article publié (sans les résumés ci-dessous), dans le livre collectif : Métapolitique contre culture. L'Heideggérisme en question, dir. François RASTIER, Édition Lambert-Lucas, juillet 2023.

Castoriadis critique de Heidegger

Résumé. — Cornelius Castoriadis reste surtout connu pour avoir fondé, avec Claude Lefort, le groupe Socialisme ou Barbarie ainsi que la revue du même nom. Dans les années 1950 et 1960, il y a développé, d'un point de vue révolutionnaire, une théorie générale des sociétés contemporaines en termes de bureaucratie et, en particulier, une critique radicale du régime stalinien issu de la Révolution russe. Mais, il a également élaboré, après la dissolution du groupe en 1967, une pensée philosophique originale. Entamée avec un bilan critique systématique du marxisme, elle a pris ensuite la forme d'une philosophie politique articulée à une ontologie du social-historique. Castoriadis a, au cours de son enquête philosophique, lu attentivement Heidegger. Malgré certaines similarités thématiques entre les deux pensées, qui tiennent à l'historisation de la raison et de l'ontologie, Castoriadis a vivement critiqué les principales idées de celui-ci. Il a, en particulier, récusé la thèse de la différence ontologique et mis en cause les interprétations heideggériennes de l'histoire de la philosophie, en particulier celles portant sur la Grèce ancienne. Critique radical des sociétés occidentales contemporaines, Castoriadis n'en a pas moins dénoncé le caractère très unilatéral de l'appréciation négative de la modernité par Heidegger. Enfin, à l'antisémitisme et au nazisme de celui-ci, puis aux conséquences quiétistes de sa pensée d'après-guerre, Castoriadis a opposé, opiniâtrement, une philosophie de l'action et un projet politique qui vise à promouvoir la capacité d'autonomie individuelle et collective.

Mots-clés. — social-historique, imaginaire radical, autonomie/hétéronomie, déterminité, création, critique de la modernité, différence ontologique, histoire de l'Être, oubli de l'Être

« C'est l'activité humaine qui a engendré l'exigence

d'une vérité brisant les murs des représentations

de la tribu chaque fois instituées »

C. Castoriadis, « La ‟fin de la philosophie” ? », 1990.

1. Castoriadis, penseur politique et philosophe

Cornelius Castoriadis est un intellectuel gréco-français né à Constantinople en 1922. Il mène de front des études de droit, d'économie et de philosophie à Athènes. Il s'engage en politique dès l'adolescence en rejoignant une organisation trotskyste. Dans la tourmente de la guerre civile grecque, il est la cible du parti communiste grec stalinien. Suite à l'obtention d'une bourse de l'Institut français d'Athènes, il vient à Paris à la fin 1945 pour y faire une thèse de philosophie. Il milite brièvement au PCI, branche française de la Quatrième internationale, puis fonde avec Claude Lefort, en 1949, le groupe Socialisme ou Barbarie. Dans la revue de même nom, il expose, sous divers pseudonymes, ses conceptions sociales et politiques. Parallèlement, il gagne sa vie comme économiste à l'OCDE. Après la dissolution de S. ou B. en 1967 et sa démission, en 1970, de l'OCDE, il s'installe comme psychanalyste. En 1979, il est élu directeur d'études à l'EHESS où il tiendra, jusqu'en 1995, un séminaire hebdomadaire de philosophie sous l'intitulé générique « Institution de la société et création historique ». Il décède à Paris en 1997.

La pensée de Castoriadis se présente, rétrospectivement, sous deux aspects principaux étroitement solidaires, l'un politique, l'autre philosophique. [...]

Bibliographie détaillée par Claude Helbling

Learning from the whirlpools of existence

Michel Alhadeff-Jones — 2026-04-23T05:00:00Z

This paper has already been published in the European Journal for Research on the Education and Learning of Adults, Vol. 12, No. 3 (2021) : Learning in times of crisis.

Abstract : The aim of this paper is to problematize and enrich the use of the concept of crisis in adult education to theorize further its contribution to the study of transformative processes. This paper discusses first the implications inherent in the adoption of event-based and processual approaches to crises. It seeks then to nuance and problematize the ways in which the relationships between crisis, learning and (trans)formative processes are conceived in adult education, especially through transformative learning theory and biographical approaches. The reflection highlights the difficulty of capturing the fluidity of learning and (trans)formative dynamics. Inspired by Edgar Morin's paradigm of complexity and illustrated by examples taken from the COVID-19 pandemic, three principles are defined to help conceiving what structures, regulates and reorganizes such dynamics. The contribution concludes by emphasizing the importance of developing a critical awareness of the rhythms that shape educational processes.

Keywords : crisis, transformation, complexity, rhythm, Adult education, COVID-19

Learning from the whirlpools of experience

Every crisis leaves traces that appear both through the regressions and the advances that emerge from it. In many regards, when we refer to the lessons learned and the transformations associated with the experience of a crisis, we are referring to its most striking effects, what emerges from it. However, from an educational perspective, the experience of a crisis cannot be reduced to the explicit marks it leaves. The outcome of a crisis depends indeed on all the activities deployed to contain, regulate, and transcend it, before, during and after the occurrence of a specific perturbation. These activities manifest themselves through processes that express the evolution of tensions (e.g., dilemmas, psychological distress, social conflicts) whose effects over time eventually lead to the emergence of specific transformations.

[...]

John Adams – China Gates (1977)

2026-04-16T05:00:00Z