Edgar MORIN: his vision of the beauty of the world as a legacy

With the passing of Edgar Morin, a rare voice is silenced. A voice that never ceased to remind us that humanity is nourished not only by knowledge, technique, or progress, but also by emotion, poetry, and beauty.

He spoke with the same wonder about a procession of ants, a light on the ocean, or the line of a high-speed train. For him, beauty was not a luxury. It was a necessity.

This vision resonates today with particular strength in the world of Artist. For Edgar Morin, beauty was what connects. It wove a link between nature and creation, between intelligence and sensitivity, between the individual and the world. In contrast to an era dominated by speed, profitability, and fragmentation, he advocated for a deeply human approach to existence: to look, to feel, to contemplate, to understand.

His thinking on complexity invites us precisely to transcend artificial oppositions. Art and life, ethics and aesthetics, the sensible and the rational are not separate worlds. They nourish each other.

This intuition is found in the approach of Artist, which transforms clothing into a territory of expression, into a material to tell stories.

For Edgar Morin, beauty crosses the thresholds of exhibitions to irrigate the world. It exists in a meeting, a landscape, a work, a handcrafted gesture, a harmony of forms or colors. It is a living experience, a reminder or a revelation of our belonging to a larger whole.

This conception aligns with the ethics of Artist: to create without dissociating beauty from meaning. To reject empty aesthetics, soulless. To seek a form of accuracy between creation, commitment, and freedom.

In a world often saturated with images, the beauty according to Morin is not that which seeks to impress. It is that which awakens. That which makes us more attentive to others and to the living, to all possibilities.

Throughout his life, Edgar Morin defended this poetic dimension of existence. He believed that human beings need dreams as much as reason, beauty as much as knowledge. This conviction now appears as a precious legacy.

(Memory photo of François during a conference at the "étonnants voyageurs" festival in Saint Malo.)

At the time we pay tribute to him, this simple and essential lesson remains: beauty is not an escape from reality. It is a deeper way of inhabiting it. And perhaps also a way to resist.

Edgar Morin leaves us with an immense body of work. This "hero," to quote Juliette Binoche, leaves above all a gaze capable of seeing, in the details of everyday life, in human creation as well as in the movements of the world, the signs of a beauty that elevates and humanizes.

This beauty will continue to inspire those who, like Artist, believe that art, fashion, and thought can still contribute to making the world more alive, more beautiful.

Source: Excerpt from the interview given to Beau Magazine in 2022.

Edgar Nahoum (1921-2026)

Sociologist, philosopher, and major thinker of the 20th and 21st centuries, he developed throughout his life the theory of "complex thought."

Author of more than a hundred works, he leaves a significant humanist legacy.