What Is Complex Thought? A Deeper Dive into Edgar Morin with Sean Kelly

In this episode of the Integration podcast, Sean Kelly joins Nick Hedlund and Brendan Graham Dempsey to go deeper into the complex thought of Edgar Morin. Put simply, Kelly says, complex thought is an invitation to a practice of the heart-mind, a way to stay connected and to stay real. Reality is complex, and making sense of it often takes ideas that seem to exclude one another. Faced with that, our habit is to simplify, which is understandable, since we often need to simplify just to get by. But as societies grow more complex, simplification turns harmful. It leads to fragmentation, and fragmentation leads to violence, which Morin understood as a broken relationship. Complex thought is the way back: a way of thinking that holds together what tends to fall apart, and, in Sean Kelly’s words, an invitation to be true to what’s real and to the full potentials of being human.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 – Introduction

00:01:52 – How Sean Kelly Discovered Morin

00:11:52 – What Is Complex Thought?

00:17:29 – Morin’s Method vs. Descartes’s Method

00:22:36 – Beyond Systems Theory: The Whole Is Both More and Less

00:32:24 – A Worldview Without Triumphalism: Homo Sapiens-Demens

00:44:46 – Consciousness and the Question of Realism

00:53:56 – What Complex Thought Brings to Integrative Metatheory

00:58:53 – What Complex Thought Leaves Out

01:01:57 – Why Hasn’t Morin Been Translated?

01:08:06 – Polycrisis and Metacrisis