Rev. Educação e Fronteiras, Dourados, v. 13, n. 00, e023006, 2023. e-ISSN:2237-258X
DOI: https://doi.org/10.30612/eduf.v13i00.16922 6
knowledge is, in fact, objectively described without the interference of subjective aspects.
Complex thinking, in turn, recognizes the limits of the approach presented in a "ceaseless
coming and going between certainties and uncertainties, between the elementary and the global,
between the separable and the inseparable" (MORIN, 2000, p. 200, our translation).
These three pillars of certainty, as outlined by Morin (2000), consisted of points of
support for classical thought and science, one of the great narratives of humanity, which aimed
to conceive certainty marks for human life itself. Here we do not intend to engage in a
discussion of paradigms or even of historical denominations of society (such as modern,
contemporary, post-modern, hyper-modern, etc.) but rather to agree with the idea that the great
narratives that ground human life and guarantee its future, such as science, religion,
enlightenment, capitalism, and so on. These collapsed in the 20th century with the First World
War, the 1929 crisis, the holocaust, and the cold war (LYOTARD, 2009).
Thus, these most extreme events of human violence against humanity and all planetary
life have become motivators of various social and academic movements that tend to refute the
structuralism intended by the grand narratives, including the idea that everything can be
understood, explained, and controlled through reason. Thus, the pillars and classical thought
are structurally shaken with the advent of concepts such as disorder, non-separability, non-
reducibility, and logical uncertainty, characteristics of complex thinking which seek to (re)unite
what was arbitrarily separated.
Based on these oppositions, Morin (2000) defines the organizational operators of
complex thinking: as the dialogic operator, the recursive operator, and the hologrammatic
operator. The Dialogic Operator aims to unite antagonistic concepts but inseparable from the
understanding of reality in its totality. According to the author, this principle "unites
antagonistic notions to think about the organizing, productive, and creative processes in the
complex world of life and human history" (MORIN, 2000, p. 204, our translation), such as
reason and emotion.
The Recursive Operator overcomes the notion of cause and effect in linearity,
considering that we are products of a system that we produce and that effects can be producers
of their causes, that is, the uncertainties and indetermination of a process in the constant
modification are considered. For Morin (1990, p. 108, our translation), a recursive process is
one in which "products and effects are, simultaneously, causes and producers of that which
produced them".