The Complex Thought:

The Complex Thought is way of seeing the world that comes, among other things, from recognizing the hypercomplexity of reality, all the more unveiled by the advancements of Science, and demands a new way of engaging the knowledge, one that puts into resonance issues pertaining multiple wisdoms such as Art, Philosophy and the Sciences.

In this reasoning, a transdisciplinary approach towards reality comes forcibly, as a need of this project of thought that presents itself as an open methodology, which is an indispensable tool in addressing the questions of our times.

In the heart of this process of knowing, the realm of certainties of the knowing subject is replaced by the need of take upon ourselves the paradoxes and live with the principle of uncertainty. The ideal of truth and neutrality, as well as the search for an absolute objectivity, are being progressively deposed and replaced by a process approach of reality, guided by an ethic and aesthetic paradigm.

The intelligence of complexity works to reunite scientific, humanistic and literary culture, including poetry, favoring the functionality of a civilizing ethic guidance in the human relations on this planet, one which allows the inclusion of the observer as integrant component of the knowledge production process, in a web of multiple, simultaneous temporalities and causalities.

What is Complexity?

The contemporary world confronts us with troubling issues: considerable increase of certain diseases, world overpopulation on one hand and growing loneliness on another, urban chaos, violence, lack of faith in public authority, social injustice, genetic manipulation, transgenic food, pollution, depletion of natural resources, global warming, information overload…

This entangled web of problems demands us to put in practice an INTELLIGENCE OF COMPLEXITY, one that teaches us a realistic optimism through the understanding that in times when everything looks grim we must not believe the worst is at hand.

The worst poison the can be inoculated in us is the belief that, as common individuals and citizens, we are impotent to promote social change. The complex thought teaches us that part and whole are intimately linked and the sum of small actions, and their interactions, transcend its local nature, being able to produce surprising effects on the whole.

This is the challenge IEC has been taking up for the last 10 years through is activities: by reuniting the multiple wisdoms, to shed some light over the riddles of our times. To identify, in the modes of existence followed by each one of us, the yeast of a micropolitical arrangement able to transform the world we live in.

Tereza Mendonça