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Edgar Morin, the creator of that enormous system known as complex thinking, was born stillborn. He says so every time he talks about the subject. He also narrates that his mother survived the famous Spanish flu pandemic a few years before his birth but was advised not to have children because of heart damage. Thus, after a delivery in which the child came into the world asphyxiated, the doctor revived him by holding him upside down and patting him forcefully all over his body for half an hour.
Morin was ten years old when his mother died from her heart condition. Edgar only remembers a few mysterious days when everyone was silent, and he had to deduce the death of his mother by himself. An aunt gave him ambiguous and distressing signals: “Your mommy went for a walk in heaven, but maybe she’s coming back.” Morin says he hated his father and all adults for how they silenced the tragedy.
Innumerable questions perplexed the little one: love; life and death; emptiness and loneliness; education and parenthood; guilt; the presence of a disease of unknown origin…a complex network of riddles that threw him into a sea of uncertainty that would always engulf him.
When he reached university age, he entered four careers simultaneously; then, during World War II, he joined the French anti-Nazi militancy, which did not exclude armed actions and the loss of friends and comrades in struggle. His intense intellectual, social, and political activity led him to publish more than 60 books throughout his life, receive numerous awards and honorary doctorates, take mortal risks more than once, and spend countless days in parties and excesses, surrounded by great friends, chosen from the most select of the already globally elite French intelligentsia of the fifties, sixties, and seventies.
Someone has described Morin’s life at one hundred and two years old as “a full life.” I continually doubt this fullness because of something the French thinker omits almost entirely in his numerous texts and autobiographical interviews: Morin is the father of two daughters, of whom he practically never speaks. He devotes a lot of space to the evolution of his ideas, the writings of his work, his political actions, his wives, his lovers, and his friends, but he mentions Veronique and Irene only a couple of times and in short paragraphs. In his book Lessons from a Century of Life, the centenarian philosopher acknowledges not being a good father.
Personally, I am deeply moved by the disheartening pain of his childhood and petrified by what he calls his negligence in parenthood. Ultimately, I am softened and moved by his confessions of nostalgia and guilt. With my heart on my sleeve, I have felt compelled to write him the letter that I publish here, aware that he will not read it, and precisely for that reason, I feel freer to express both my reproaches and my admiration and compassion.
LETTER TO EDGAR MORIN, A GREAT TEACHER BUT NOT A GOOD FATHER
Maestro, I write to you hurriedly because if I pause to think about what I want to tell you, I will probably regret it. Compared to you, wise centenarian, I am just a young writer of sixty years who does not yet know how to maintain certain protocols, and I dare to write you like this with some reproaches. I am very sorry, but I cannot contain myself, even though I haven’t found the exact tone to address you.
I will say this plainly: Master, how can a philosopher of your stature not have been a good father? I sin of what many will criticize me: to relate the person to his work. However, I am one of those who pays attention when someone talks about creating a better world but shows himself to have failed in something essential.
I confess that a few days ago, I began to calculate some events of your life and discovered that the year your eldest daughter was born and the next, you devoted entirely to research and writing about death. “I spent 1949 and 1950 at the National Library. What wonderful drunkenness to spend your days in that library! I led a practically monastic life. I read the books they brought me; I went out to smoke a cigarette; I ate; I came back.”
In multiple autobiographies and interviews, you speak with this same passion about countless places, people, and episodes of your life: the French resistance, cinematographic art, the Rolling Stones, Greenwich Village, dreams in which you say goodbye to your deceased mother and father … but you do not mention your daughters. You lecture on good and evil, the devil and God, and love and friendship. You tell us about your relationship with Barthes, Durás, and at least two hundred famous friends with whom you sang, danced, got drunk, and sometimes used marijuana and cocaine (although only as small helpers to party). You confess everything to us, but in none of those memories are Veronique and Irene.
You talk about Latin America, Asia, and Africa, the growing reception that the world has given your thinking, and a university in Hermosillo, Mexico, which bears your name. You also speak about the planetary epoch and that we are probably heading toward the abyss; as the author of The Little Prince said, “In every child, there is a little Mozart murdered.” You speak of the death of the universe and even about yours, yet there, next to the tomb that awaits you, are not your daughters.
You comment on fraternity and future education and denounce that “there will be no human progress if there is no progress of understanding.” You say that you have come to feel “mystically the moment when knowledge leads to mystery,” and you repeat communion, living poetically, love, love, love … but in none of those paragraphs are Irene and Veronique.
I’m not saying that you didn’t love them, but they are not in your accounts or the expression of your memories. Where are they, master? I cannot conceive of a father whose children are not the first thing that comes to mind, especially one who expresses himself about the world and humanity as you do. Your daughters do not appear even when you talk about your genes and the centuries-long odyssey they undertook to finally produce you. And when asked who Edgar Morin is, you answer, “First of all, I am a son, an orphaned son of my mother who died during my childhood, a son until sixty-three years old of a father who died in 1984, a son of my acts that made me Morin, a son of the Earth…” Do you see, master? It would seem that you are never a father. Do you notice that you mention those who came before you but not those two women you brought into the world? Do you know, master, that by not including them, you erase yourself from the sequence of centuries in which you so euphorically participate?
I want to tell you that one day I was surprised by a famous playwright when he said that whatever the delights of writing or directing plays, the greatest pleasure of theatrical life is acting, getting on stage, and playing a role in front of the audience. I think the same thing happens when you are a parent. If you have children, you can do many things, but nothing equals that face-to-face “unbearable love” (I do not remember who said this) and deserving the unique responsibility of raising another human being.
I ask on the fly: When fatherhood arrived, did you have to choose to continue raising yourself first, as you learned in childhood? I repeat your words, expressed in old age: “Father of two daughters, I did not try to educate them because I thought that there was nothing better than educating oneself, as was my case.” A great traveler of complexity, an adventurer of certainty and uncertainty, you frequently quote Antonio Machado: “The road is made by walking.” And it’s true. However, we all know that first, you must know how to walk. Obviously, no one can teach us how better than our parents, especially in the world you describe, where we inhabit islands of certainties surrounded by oceans of uncertainty.
But children do not only learn from us; they are also sources of knowledge, a master class, an intensive course, we could say. Whoever is a father finds it to be the best opportunity of his life to know the world. Fatherhood confronts us in our essence: if we seek power, children become our invincible detractors. If we are looking for love, they are our guides. In fatherhood, there is no neutral attitude: it is not accepted; it is pursued; it is not abandoned; one flees from it.
Despite all the above, I want to tell you, master, that you have not done everything poorly as a father. Fleeing from your biological paternity (but also from loneliness, which is the opposite extreme), you chose something more within your reach: to adopt all other human beings as your children. And we thank you; we thank you for educating us in so many ways! By being profoundly free and independent, not pigeonholed, and refusing Manichaeism, you showed us how an incessant search for love could converge with a clarified mind. And by discovering and describing the world as an infinite number of facts and variables, you allowed us to understand knowledge as a conjunction of wisdom and to admit the inevitable mystery.
However, regarding all that wisdom you found and shared, I believe there is a much more direct, perfect, and valuable opportunity for those who genuinely embrace their fatherhood. Our philosophy? I assure you that others will conceive it as well or better than us. But no one will provide our children the love and education we can give them. And no one will teach us what is essential like they do.
Master, if I have dared to speak to you like this, it is because you have told us that “it is necessary to educate and re-educate educators” and to be attentive to the gravest error of all: the mistake of underestimating error. In recent years, now over the age of one hundred, you have faced this mistake and managed to recognize it: “In recent years,” you say, “I would have liked to recover a family life with my daughters. I am like the character in the film The Mule, played by Clint Eastwood, who spent his life gardening and participating in floral contests and now only aspires to recover his warm community. The adventures of my life, my amorous and intellectual passions, and my negligence have deprived me of the wonder of a united family.”
You are brave to say so. I suppose such a confession will move your daughters, and they will find one more opportunity for forgiveness. Your words remind me of the old story of the man who undertook a long and tiring journey in search of a treasure, which, after failing and returning home, he found buried in his yard.
Thank you very much, master. We continue to celebrate your long life.
I feel my dream of a human fraternity, of a human community, of the poetic dimension of beings and things.
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Love is the height of the union of madness and wisdom, their supreme conjunction: they are revealed as inseparable and generate each other.
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Each of us is a microcosm that carries within the irreducible unity of our being the multiple “all” of which we are part in the bosom of the great whole.
Edgar Morin
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
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