Edgar Morin, a French sociologist, anthropologist, ecologist, philosopher and filmmaker "whose work spanned epochs and disciplines, dazzling his countrymen with his erudition and life lessons learned in the Resistance," died May 29, the New York Times reported. He was 104. On X, French President Emmanuel Macron praised him as a "soldier of the Resistance, fighter and free spirit, a defender of nature and humanity," and called him "humanism personified."
Morin "was the last survivor of a generation of intellectuals shaped by their experiences during the Nazi occupation of France during World War II, giving his books and pronouncements a distinct moral authority in his country," the Times noted, adding that his "passage through, and engagement in, the previous century's most turbulent moments gave him a credibility matched by few."
In a profile celebrating Morin's 100th birthday in 2021, the newspaper Libération called him "the grandfather of all the French" and "the memory of the preceding century."
Morin's final book, one of nearly 120 he wrote or co-wrote, has just been released; his first was published nearly 80 years ago. In between, he wrote dozens of works, including autobiography as well as books on anthropology, sociology, philosophy, epistemology, cinema studies, biology, ecology, history, and political science.
Few of his books were translated into English, but "he was widely followed in the Mediterranean world and in Latin America, where university research centers have been named for him," the Times wrote, noting that Morin "traversed much of the 20th century and a quarter of the 21st as both participant and critical observer. First, he was a teenage antifascist in 1938, helping put together packages of food and clothing for Spanish Republicans. Then, hunted by the Nazis during the war, he was in overlapping Resistance networks with the writer Marguerite Duras and the future French president François Mitterrand. After the war, he was a publicly repentant ex-Communist and anti-Stalinist... and, for many of his subsequent years, an autodidact sharpshooter at the edges of academia in France."
Morin sometimes complained that few people had read what he considered his major work, La Méthode, now being translated into English for the first time as Method 1977-2004, a six-volume philosophical treatise on knowledge, the nature and meaning of thinking, and a "meditation" on "what it means to be human," as philosopher Roger-Pol Droit wrote in Le Monde in 2001.
Instead, he seems most likely to be remembered for an autobiography "detailing his split with the French Communist Party, along with two works of sociology dissecting France's fractures during its years of postwar prosperity, and his breakthrough documentary film probing that theme," the 2020 French TV film Edgar Morin, Journal d'une Vie, the Times wrote.
Morin observed in the TV film that there were some aspects of knowledge he couldn't reach: "As far as God is concerned, what I want to say is, I don't have any relations with this chap.... I don't deny there is a mystery in things. We can't shut up in our minds and reduce to ideas the infinite complexity and the infinite mystery of the world."