Edgar Morin is one of the most important thinkers in Europe today and one of the rare futurologists who predict what will happen to the world according to what is happening today, in addition to being a French philosopher and sociologist whose fame has applied prospects.

And in his book "Where is the World Walking?"

Moran believes that progress does not mean the benefit of humanity, citing the exploitation of the great nations of modern technology for their own benefit, and the failure of man to eliminate brutality, and he predicted in his book that the history of the world will not stop violence and clashes, considering that we are still living the values ​​of the Iron Age.

Last year, with the Corona pandemic, Moran presented a critical reading of contemporary man and his future, bringing that back to the spotlight of his previous works, including the lexicon of the 20th century;

Which expected a lot, especially what related to the possibility of global epidemics as a result of infection due to the transformation of humans into a migratory organism all the time, "Nomad".

Moran's work falls under the category of anticipatory warning and an attempt to reform man by tracking his mistakes that might push him to his end.

Within this framework, we can download his book "The Hermetic Mind", which was devoted to education, and transmitted to Arabic by the late Tunisian sociologist Moncef Wanas, and it was recently published by the Tunis Institute for Translation.

Education

“My path in the last ten years has led me to write this book. As I grew more and more convinced of the need to reform thought, and then reform education, I took every opportunity to think about it,” says Edgar Moran.

It is aimed at everyone and at the individual, and can be particularly beneficial for teachers and learners.

Moran attaches great importance to breeding;

Education, according to his view, means "the use of means capable of securing the formation and development of the human being, and it also means these same means."

As for teaching, it has "the art or act of conveying information to the student in a way that he understands and assimilates it. It has a more specific meaning, because it is only a ceremonial meaning."

The cover of the book "The Hermetic Mind" by Edgar Morin, translated by the late Tunisian sociologist Moncef Wannas (Al Jazeera)

And he sees in this art deficiencies and limitations in return for an education that gives it vast potential for reform.

Moran adopts Claes’s saying, "Knowledge does not make us better off or happier" in exchange for an education that helps a person be better, even if he does not realize happiness.

Moran divided his book into 9 chapters: challenges, the human condition, learning how to live, confronting suspicion, learning the situation of the citizen, reforming thinking, the three stages and beyond the contradictions, and adding all of this with appendices: the black hole of secularism, the interdisciplinary, interdisciplinary and transient, migration and integration, and the self concept.

Moran believes that one of the most important challenges facing man today is the issue of very specific specialization, which "prevents one from seeing the comprehensive as well as the essential, and the fact that the real problems are never partial", and believes that the division of specializations makes the awareness of "what is jointly woven" impossible, because intelligence is just as He says it is only good to separate, as it modifies the complex of the world into separate and disjointed pieces, and breaks down the problems and ultimately makes what is multi-dimensional one-dimensional.

Edgar Moran also reaches the cultural dimension as one of the challenges after it has been divided into parts. Human culture is a comprehensive culture that is nourished by philosophy, attempt and novel, and it is what we can call general intelligence that confronts major human questions and stimulates thinking about knowledge, while scientific culture separates Between knowledge and it may lead to wonderful discoveries and brilliant theories, but it will not lead us to thinking about human destiny.

Moran adds that there are some other challenges, such as the sociological challenge and the civil challenge.

The tight mind

Edgar Morin begins in his dissolution of the idea of ​​the hermetic mind from the saying of the French Renaissance writer Michel de Montigny, "It is better for the mind to be tight than it is crowded."

Overcrowding is synonymous with accumulation and alignment, and it is not selective and unorganized. As for the tight head, it gives up the accumulation of knowledge and seeks to possess two things: a general readiness to present and address problems, and organizational principles that allow linking knowledge and giving it meaningful meaning.

The tight mind is a mind that seeks to organize knowledge and avoid its sterile accumulation.

Correlated thought opens up to general contexts with its causal nature, which results in a new scientific thought that breaks with the partial or is not satisfied with it in light of the transformations that science has defined with the emergence of new sciences that the thinker called systems such as ecology, earth sciences and cosmology.

The French ninetieth philosopher - of Spanish Jewish origins (Sephardim) - is known for his positions in favor of the right of Palestinians to establish a state of their own, and an article he wrote in Le Monde led him to denounce Israeli policy to French courts in 2004.

Human condition

And within Edgar Moran's talk about the human condition and how the human being is no longer only the subject of the human sciences, but also the subject of the correct sciences that have been investigated in his genesis and existence in this world, and after he presents the contribution of these sciences to defining the human condition, he takes us to literature and starts from the phrase Yves Bonvoy. It is the words, with their preemptive power, that distinguish us from the animal situation. ”He cites the French writer François Bonne, who believes that we have separated from literature as man’s subjective thinking within the framework of universality by placing it in the service of the tongue to become a subordinate subject, and he calls for its restoration and return. It to his "perfect virtue".

The novel and cinema, for example, give us what is invisible to the human sciences that conceal or dissolve the existential, subjective and emotional character of the human being who lives through his emotions, and Edgar Moran believes that the novel and the cinema are the two that present the relationship of the human being to the other, society and the world.

The novel of the nineteenth century and the film of the twentieth century transport us across continents, in war and peace, and refers to the monumental "Search for the Lost Time" by the French writer Marcel Proust as a microcosm of the human condition.

Moran laments Milan Kundera, who believes in his book "The Art of the Novel" that the novel has become more than just a novel;

Since the nineteenth century, the progress of the human being has become in its most complexities, and whatever this individual person is, he in itself constitutes a universal system.

While the arts enter us in the aesthetic dimension of existence as nature pushes us to pursue beauty in our existence and in us, behind every great work of literature and arts is a deep thought about the human condition.

Learn to live

One of the distinguished chapters in the book is "Learning to Live", in which the thinker deals with the issue of learning starting from Rousseau's phrase "I want to teach him how to live."

The subject of education, based on the French sociologist Durkheim, is not to teach the student more knowledge, but rather to "build a deep inner state in him, and a kind of polarization of the soul that leads him towards a specific destination not only in childhood but throughout life."

This means that knowledge is not sufficient in the breeding process. Rather, acquired knowledge should be converted into "wisdom".

The author of "The Wise Mind" concludes with the necessity of transforming educational information into "knowledge" and transforming knowledge into "wisdom" by defining goals and directing to them.

The school of life and human understanding is presented as a comprehensive school as a school of language, a school of self-discovery, a school of human complexity, and a school of human understanding.

The sociologist continues to elevate the status of literature as "the only one that can guarantee such situations of communication blockages, closed-mindedness, comic or tragic differences and their clarification", says Junoviaf Matisse;

Literature, poetry, cinema, psychology and philosophy must, according to Moran, all converge around the goal of becoming schools of understanding, and this needs a successful pedagogy to be adopted to reach the education of the human we want.

Then the author takes us to the realm of human suspicion and how to confront it in its three types:

The cerebral, psychological and epistemological, invites the individual to be aware that his life is an adventure based on suspicion and suspicion, even absolute certainty, which is his death.

Then the researcher takes us towards the citizen, the concept of the state and the unity of destiny, society and the international myth, to focus mainly on the French identity from its inception to the stage of integrating immigrants who gradually organize into the French identity through education and through the study of history and interacting with him emotionally continuously until it is rooted in the individual as a factor Authentic from itself.

Moran says, "Reformation of thinking cannot be started from scratch, as it has precedents in the culture of the humanities, literature and philosophy, which is prepared within the sciences."

Thinking reform is a key historical necessity. We are victims of two types of closed thought: The first is thought that contains spaces;

The techno-science of simplified thought (relative to Hippocrates) that cuts the complex fabric of reality into parts of sausages, and the second thought is closed and involves ethnic or nation, which divides the fabric of the homeland-earth into pieces;

Hence the necessity to reconsider thinking and its mechanisms, and to face the challenges of the new world that fell into decadence, which prompted Edgar to release his cry, "The stagnation has begun to creep in, and I do not know how to stop it."