________________________________________________________________ ______________

Round Table: Dialogue among Civilizations United Nations, New York, 5 September 2000 Provisional verbatim transcription

Address by Edgar Morin (France)

Mr. Morin (interpretation from French): What Mr. Yakovlev suggested reminds me of T.S. Eliot who said that knowledge could be lost in information, and wisdom could be lost in knowledge. In other words information is necessary but not sufficient. If we have only information we lose a lot of knowledge.

I should also like to say that information does not provide understanding. Here we are attempting a dialogue on dialogue via many monologues. But that means we are trying to understand each other despite all the difficulties that that involves. We have heard that dialogue is neither debate nor discussion but is an attempt to understand the ideas and arguments of others. It was quite right to emphasize that there may well be two modes of comprehension. There is objective comprehension X what I just said and the idea of understanding ideas and situations. Then there is subjective comprehension, that is from subject to subject, from person to person. That type of understanding is an understanding of what the other person feels and how we make other people understand what we feel. In any case, we know that from a biological, intellectual, sociological, and psychological point of view there is no such thing as cold, hard intelligence in human beings. That only exists in computers. Human intelligence always requires sentiment and passion. If we want to hold a dialogue of civilizations it is only because we have this passion for peace and understanding, otherwise we would never even attempt the dialogue of civilization. Moreover, Samuel P. Huntington said that we must refuse war in order to achieve civilization otherwise we will be tempted to close our eyes to each other's situations and not to understand each other.

We are facing a number of very difficult problems. Why is it so difficult for us to understand each other? Well, it is because the world is very complex and difficult and we cannot understand all its elements. Secondly, we have means of acquiring knowledge that separate us rather than link us and make it possible for us to understand global problems. Each of us sees one individual problem without seeing the others. Consequently we need to envisage reform of education, not only history books, but education as a whole. In other words, we must teach people to understand others. That is necessary in all countries. We must have an introduction to the complexity of the world. We must have an introduction to the realities of the world. We can only get a glimpse of the tasks with which we are just beginning to come to grips but these have been assigned to us and we must undertake them.

Mr. Picco: Mr. Perez de Cuellar.

________________________________________________________________ ______________

© UNESCO 2000 | www.unesco.org/dialogue2001