World Futures, 67: 372–379, 2011 Copyright C  Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0260-4027 print / 1556-1844 online DOI: 10.1080/02604027.2011.585913 PHENOMENOLOGY OF DISCOVERY: THE COGNITION OF COMPLEXITY MAURO MALDONATO Facolt` a di Lettere e Filosofia, Universit` a degli Studi della Basilicata, Potenza, Italy The decline of classical epistemology on unity-identity-totality shows it becomes more urgent to leave formal conventionalism behind, and to use a new diverging language. Every scientist must feel the emotion of the beginner. Nevertheless, we must not have illusions. Pure observation does not exist. Moreover, there are no laws that can remove the asymmetries of a system. The knowledge and scientific practice free themselves from the obsession of clarity, of linearity and from the idea of evolution that follows and precedes through pre-determined ways and versions. What we need is a multiple, connected intellection that allows us to look at science and at the world without the distorting effect of ingenuous methodologies and classifications that, if on the one hand put us at our ease, on the other hand keep us from the knowledge of things. KEYWORDS: Complexity, consciousness, epistemology, identity, phenomenology. An autobiography is an experiment with inevitably uncertain outcomes. There are no stars that guide our way and the life impulse is too strong to allow even the most accurate anamnesis to render its sense. How could we form a definite opinion of ourselves, if there is no point outside of ourselves from which it is possible to watch ourselves and tell us about it? We can only tell a story. Our story is the story of a journey that we only partially know and decide on. That would be enough to deter us from any conclusive judgment of ourselves or of things. Therefore, we do not consider the assigned task easy at all. If we did, it would mean that everything would be clear in our lives. But this is not the case. We neither know how things have ever really gone, nor what direction we are moving in. The story of a human begins from any point remembered by chance and at that point, life was already rather complex. We could, perhaps, think of it as a journey without any map. Without any start, and toward a destination with no guarantee. This journey sometimes reveals surprising and unheard-of events. I was still a young student of medicine, when a small, apparently irrelevant event caused a deep change in my intellectual life. Until that moment I had prepared myself to think; then I really had to begin to think. Something called Address correspondence to Mauro Maldonato, Universit` a degli Studi della Basili- cata, Facolt` a di Lettere e Filosofia, Via Nazario Sauro 85, Potenza 85100, Italy. E-mail: maldonato@unibas.it 372