Thinking complexity is not about seeking complications. It is about refusing mutilating simplifications.

It means recognising that the real — human, social, biological or psychic — is made of links, tensions, and nested levels.

Complex thinking, as formulated by Edgar Morin since the 1970s, offers not a tool but an intellectual and ethical attitude. It invites us to think of phenomena not as isolated blocks but as living processes caught in networks of interdependence.

Faced with the fragmentation of knowledge, Morin argues for a transversal thinking that articulates disciplines, levels of reality and apparently contradictory logics. Against the classical Cartesian paradigm — which separates, reduces, ranks — he proposes a relational, dynamic, recursive thinking.

This turn was born of a double dissatisfaction: that of the hard sciences before the limits of determinism, the irreducibility of the living, the unpredictability of systems; and that of the human sciences before the complexity of behaviour. The real obeys neither simple linearity nor single-track causality. Another reading grid is needed.

In La Méthode, Edgar Morin starts with the living: how does life, so improbable, sustain itself in the rising entropy of the universe? By self-organising. By taking in disorder to create novelty. The living cell is not a well-oiled clock: it is a knot of adaptive interactions, constantly rebalancing.

He then extends these observations to social organisations, education systems, political institutions. Here too, what stands is not a fixed structure but an organisation able to negotiate the unforeseen, to learn, to transform itself without losing itself.

Complex thinking also speaks to clinical work. In family therapy and in crisis work, systemic practitioners experience daily the effects of an intervention on a moving system.

A symptom is not the trace of an inner disorder to be corrected, but the signal of an entire system under tension. Thinking in complexity means seeing that a child’s complaint may regulate a marital tension, and that a colleague’s resistance may conceal an invisible loyalty to the group.

The systemic approach has been one of the most powerful contemporary vehicles of this complex thinking applied to relationship: circular causality, co-construction of reality, levels of communication. All of them refuse linearity in order to follow the spiral form of living exchange.

For Morin, thinking in complexity is not only a matter of intelligence but also an ethics of modesty.

This calls for continuous attention, humble questioning, and listening to interactions. The complex practitioner does not impose a solution: they co-construct a path of understanding and accept revising their hypotheses. They act not from above, but from an adjusted dialogue with the living system they support.