2. The Domain of Anthropology

2. The Domain of Anthropology

Starting with the idea of synergy as it appears in Orthodoxy and chiefly in hesychasm, synergetic anthropology proceeds to a certain much more general paradigm. The advancement to this paradigm has several stages. In the first stage we analyze the anthropological aspect of synergy in hesychast practice. In synergy human energy manages to achieve the contact and coherence with the Divine energy: evidently, it should be an event with important anthropological contents. In all usual regimes of empiric being such contact is inaccessible for a human person; in other words, the person is closed or locked for it. In synergy the person achieves this contact; in other words, he/she becomes open or unlocked for it. Thus what is achieved by a human person in synergy can be described as his/her opening-up or unlocking towards the Divine energy that belongs to another ontological horizon. This is the first conclusion: in the anthropological aspect, synergy is the ontological unlocking of a human person. In hesychast practice this unlocking makes accessible the higher steps of the Ladder, at which the person approaches in his/her energies the union with Divine being defined as “personal being-communion” in modern Orthodox theology. According to Orthodox personology, the concept of personality is identified with the Divine Hypostasis so that personal being as such is Divine being whereas an empiric man is not considered as personality. He can, however, partake in personality and convert himself into personality in the communion with God; as Russian philosopher Lev Karsavin says, “I should regard myself as personality insofar as I  am one with Christ”[5] . It means that the union with God in hesychast practice is at the same time man’s conversion (though not in his essence but only in his energies) into the personal mode of being; or, in other words, the constitution of human personality. And since synergy is man’s ontological unlocking towards personal being, it can be considered as a paradigm of the human constitution that corresponds to the constitution into personality conceived as Divine Hypostasis.

Now we can proceed to the first generalization of this paradigm. We turn to spiritual practices created in other world religions (such as Islamic Sufism, classical yoga, Tibetan tantric Buddhism, Taoism, Zen) and we find in them phenomena close to synergy, but not identical to it. The common feature of all these ancient schools of spiritual experience is that they are practices of human self- transformation (“practices of the Self”, to use the famous term by Foucault) aiming to achieve man’s union with a different horizon of being or, in other words, perform man’s actual ontological transcension. In all spiritual practices this transcension is conceived as an event in the dimension of energy, or being-action, that represents the conversion of the set of all human energies into a different horizon of being. The key distinction of such ontological conversion is that it needs motive power which can only be some “outer energy”, i.e. energy perceived by a man as not belonging to him or any source in his horizon of being, but coming from a certain “Source-Beyond-There” (Vnepolozhny Istok, one of the key concepts of synergetic anthropology). Thus, like Christian practice, any spiritual practice demands the contact and coherence of human energies with energies of a different horizon of being, and this phenomenon of the contact and coherence of two ontologically different kinds of energy could be called synergy. However, conceptions of being and all the ontological discourse in Oriental spiritual traditions are of a very specific nature radically different from European and Christian ontology. The Christian idea of personal God Whose energies collaborate with energies of a human person is deeply alien to Oriental spirituality, and so the plain transfer of the paradigm of synergy into the context of Far-Eastern spiritual practices would produce a grossly westernized and distorted view of them. Keeping in mind the first distinctive feature of synergy, its roots in personal being, we should consider synergy as such, in its full form, as a specifically Christian paradigm. Nevertheless, the radical divergence of spiritual practices in their ontological positions is combined with their far-going resemblance in anthropological aspects. Looking at these aspects closely, we discover that there exists an universal paradigm of spiritual practice (SP) embracing all the set of them; and its core is nothing but synergy taken in its anthropological contents. Here is this paradigm presented as a list of principal properties shared by all spiritual practices.

A. SP is a holistic practice of the Self, the goal of which is actual ontological transformation, transcension of man’s mode of being. This practice deals exclusively with man’s «energetic image», the configuration of all energies of a human being, and elaborates a special art of controlled and directed transformation of this image.

B. SP has progressive nature and discrete (ladder) structure: it is divided into clearly distinct steps, all the series of which is strictly ordered. Each step is a definite type of man’s «energetic image», and the series goes from the initial step corresponding to Spiritual Gate to the final one corresponding to a certain «higher spiritual state», or telos. According to the point A, the telos corresponds to a mode of being different from the usual empiric being, and it is not universal, but different for each SP.

C. The ladder of SP includes the group of lower steps, which basically correspond to processes and procedures of preparatory purification. The purification is also holistic, including necessarily corporeal, emotional and intellectual components.

D. The central block of SP solves the key problem of building-up the anthropological mechanism for the ascent to the telos. Such mechanism should provide the motive power for the ascent, which amounts to opening the access to the ontologically outer energetic factor. It is always realized as a certain analogue of the “ontological mover” in hesychast practice representing some refined school of meditation or prayer that includes special techniques of concentration of attention helping to guard the meditation from all disturbances. In its concrete form, however, the “ontological mover” is in no way universal, but very different for each SP.

E. With the formation of the «ontological mover» SP enters its last big block, in which there appear clear manifestations of the approaching change of fundamental predicates of man’s horizon of being. These manifestations include, in the first place, the emergence of new perceptive modalities.

F. The necessary condition of the achievement of the telos of SP is (cf. the point D) the participation of some energetic factors («energies of the Source-Beyond-There») that are neither provided nor controlled by a man himself.

The last property draws a demarcation line between genuine SPs and all kinds of purely psychological practices, techniques and trainings. At the same time it shows that any SP includes the creation of a certain energetic structure kindred to synergy: man’s energetic image must be transformed in such a way that human energies reach the contact with energies of the Source- Beyond-There. In non-Christian practices this outer energetic factor is something much different from Divine energy in Christian experience so that the created structure is not identical to synergy; but still it preserves its basic anthropological contents. Indeed, if human energies reach the contact with some ontologically different energies, it means that the human person becomes unlocked towards these energies, and eo ipso towards the corresponding horizon of being.

Thus the core of any SP is a certain modification of synergy. Like the original Christian paradigm, it is the contact and coherence of two ontologically different kinds of energy, and in the anthropological aspect, it represents the ontological unlocking of a human person. The other basic feature of the Christian paradigm is also preserved: the unlocking is a practice, in which basic structures of the human person and his/her identity are formed-up. It means that any SP is a constitutive anthropological practice, and the generalized synergy, like the original one, is a paradigm of the human constitution. However, the concrete form of this paradigm is different for each SP. Which personological structures are formed-up in a given SP, is determined by the telos of this SP, and, in the first place, by ontological nature of this telos. As for this nature, there is the dichotomy: the ontological horizon corresponding to the telos can represent either personal being (which is the case in Christianity and Islam) or impersonal being (which is the case in all religions and spiritual traditions of the East). In these two cases the process of SP has sharply different dynamics and forms up different anthropological and personological structures. If the telos corresponds to personal being (conceptualized as personal being-communion in Christianity), and synergy is achieved, the progress to the telos is, as described above, the process of spontaneous or self-organizing generation of an ascending hierarchy of energetic configurations. These configurations, or “anthropological energoforms”, are structures of human personality and identity that approach personal being-communion which, in its turn, can be characterized as the ontological identity of the three basic personological concepts: personal communion (between the three Divine Persons or Hypostases) – love treated as an ontological principle – and perichoresis, or a complete and perfect exchange of being between the Hypostases. This is the paradigm of the human constitution determined by the ontological unlocking towards personal being.

In the case of the unlocking towards impersonal being, we must say at once that the very formula “impersonal being” is not quite correct for the telos of Eastern practices. Usually these practices describe their telos in a strongly apophatic discourse characterizing it as not only non- personal, but also as non-being. All various notions used for the telos of SPs in Eastern traditions – Nirvana, Heaven, Great Void, etc. – share principal predicates, which express the absence of any dynamics and any positive contents, phenomenal or noumenal: absolute cosmic calm, void, stillness, immobility, etc. etc. Obviously, the process of approaching such telos must be very different from the ascent to personal being. With clarity and force Eastern practices stress that their way demands to reject as an empty illusion all ideas of autonomous human personality, Ego, subject, individuality, etc. By definition, any SP is man’s (self-)transformation, but in Eastern practices this transformation is not so much the generation of new anthropological and personological structures as the dismantling and dissolving of the existing structures: a sui generis man’s self-deconstruction. These practices are also based on man’s ontological unlocking and the creation of the ontological mover, but now the mover is of directly opposite nature. It is again the union of two activities, the guarding activity of attention and the main activity securing the ontological ascent; however, the main activity has now the opposite functions. In the ascent to personal being the preconditions of synergy discovered in hesychast experience were the “driving- away of visual images and heating-up of emotions” (emotions of love to and striving after God).

These preconditions produced, using the temperature metaphor, the heating-up of man’s inner reality which led, in its turn, to the unlocking of this reality and the subsequent spontaneous generation of new structures. Contrary to it, in the progress to the impersonal telos the preconditions of the ontological unlocking (found also in the experience) turn out to be contemplative and meditative techniques that imply the driving-away of all emotions and so the cooling-down of man’s inner reality. It is this cooling-down that leads to the dissolving and deconstruction of all personological structures. Thus in the personalist economy of Western practices the core of the ontological mover is the prayer as a hot discourse, and the ontological unlocking leads to the generation of new personological structures; while in the impersonal economy this core is the meditation- contemplation as a cool discourse (in McLuhan’s classification), and the ontological unlocking leads to the deconstruction of personological structures. Clearly, the second case includes also a certain paradigm of the human constitution that is opposite to the personalist paradigm and describes a specific constitution of the human being in the gradual dissolving of his/her individuality as well as all personal activities. The striking example of such constitution is classical yoga representing the approach to its telos as the state of Samadhi, in which “self-consciousness is devoid of its own form and is completely dissolved” (Sutra III.3 of Patanjali). – Summing up, we find that in the field of spiritual practices synergy takes the form of the paradigm of the ontological unlocking of the human person, and this paradigm has two opposite representations as the paradigm of the human constitution: the Western paradigm of the building-up of personological structures ascending to personal being-communion, and the Eastern paradigm of the dismantling of personological structures descending to absolute predicateless reality above the distinction of being and non-being.

There comes now the next level of the generalization. We have extended the Christian synergy to the paradigm of the ontological unlocking of the human person and found that it is the paradigm of human constitution. But we can go further: clearly, synergy seen as the anthropological unlocking represents a very general mechanism of human constitution. Indeed, in its inner mechanism this constitution is a relational event, in which a human being and its Other actualize their mutual relation entering into contact and interaction[6] . In their contact the human being should open or unlock itself to the Other, and in this unlocking a meeting of two different energies or forces takes place, in which the energies or forces of the Other exert their formative and constitutive role. And here a question should be asked: is it necessary that the Other appearing as a constitutive agent represents a different horizon of being or, in other words, is an “ontological Other”? For the right answer it should be taken into account that we discuss the constitution of the human being as such, as a general category, and not the constitution of a particular empiric individual. Particular situations and personological structures are infinitely diverse, and almost any part of social or anthropological reality can in principle find itself in the role of the constitutive Other for somebody: e.g., in the good old film “Bonny and Clyde” we see two individuals who mutually and perfectly exert constitutive influence upon each other forming a dyad locked from all the rest of the world.

But evidently all these countless representations of the Other to particular individuals are not the Other to the human being as such or, synonymously, to all the horizon of anthropological reality. 

Nevertheless this “Other in the strong sense” is not necessarily the ontological Other, it can be conceived not ontologically as well. A human person can identify the horizon of his/her existence with that of his/her consciousness and in this case the Other will be represented as the Unconscious.

The latter is never considered to be a different mode of being; its otherness is not ontological, but ontical, in Heidegger’s terms, so that the Unconscious is nothing but the ontical Other of the human being as such. It is well-known that man’s openness to the Unconscious produces anthropological manifestations of a special type called patterns or figures of the Unconscious, such as neuroses, complexes, manias, phobias, etc. From the personological viewpoint, any kind of such patterns forms up a certain human constitution (“neurotic constitution”, “manic constitution”, etc.), and different kinds must be considered as different versions or representations of a certain paradigm of human constitution: namely, the paradigm defined by the ontical unlocking of a human person towards the Unconscious as his/her ontical Other. Evidently, this paradigm is a further extension of synergy to the field of anthropology and personology. It is radically different from the paradigm defined by the ontological unlocking: the corresponding structures of personality and identity are of a specific topological nature displayed in detail by Gilles Deleuze. Next, let us notice that a human person unlocks him/herself also in virtual practices when he/she goes out into anthropological virtual reality. Indeed, virtual reality is defined with respect to actual reality: it consists of such phenomena that are not fully actualized, which means that any of them lacks some constitutive properties or predicates of a certain actual phenomenon; in physical language, it belongs to the “virtual cloud” of the latter. Hence a human person in anthropological virtual practice is under-actualized and, in this sense, uncompleted so that we can say that it is also unlocked (although this virtual unlocking is not the unlocking towards a certain Other that acts with its energies or forces as a constitutive agent). The distance from the original form of synergy is in this case more significant. Nevertheless it is obvious that the virtual unlocking of a human person also defines a certain paradigm of human constitution: the virtual constitution is a “privative constitution” characterized by the lack of some constitutive predicates of the actual constitution of human personality. It has an unlimited number of particular representations that differ from each other according to the privative principle: they all have different sets of lacking predicates. Thus we have found three basic kinds of the anthropological unlocking, each of them corresponding to a certain paradigm of human constitution. Synergetic anthropology advances reasons that the human being as such forms up its constitution in extreme anthropological manifestations: such manifestations, in which a human person starts to experience certain changes in fundamental predicates of his/her existence; the set of all such manifestations is called Anthropological Border. Evidently, the manifestations, in which the described kinds of the anthropological unlocking take place, belong to the Anthropological Border. Now, it is not so difficult to make sure that these three kinds of extreme manifestations exhaust the Anthropological Border. (In brief, the reason is that there are three ways only, by means of which an anthropological manifestation can belong to the Border: the meeting with the ontological Other, the meeting with the ontical Other and the virtual way of the under-actualization.) As a result, we come to the important conclusion: when synergy is extended to the paradigm of the anthropological unlocking it provides the universal paradigm of human constitution. This paradigm has three basic representations, or anthropological formations: the Ontological Man, the Ontical Man and the Virtual Man. Thus in the framework of synergetic anthropology synergy, after being reinterpreted as the anthropological unlocking, becomes the core of anthropology of a new type, nonclassical, nonessentialist and subjectless. Here it serves as the main conceptual tool for the key anthropological problems: in the first place, the establishment of the repertory of the principal types  of human identities[7] and the reconstruction of historical dimension of anthropology, i.e. the historical succession of anthropological formations. But what is more important for our theme, the new role of synergy brings us right up to the verge of the next level of generalization. It is the last adventure of synergy in the field of modern anthropology: here it grows up to the status of a key principle of a new episteme for the humanities. Let us remind, first of all, that now, since the moving aside of the structuralist paradigm, the sphere of the humanities is in the period of epistemological or epistemic vacuum: it lacks an integrating methodological paradigm and epistemological Grundverfassung. The vacuum has many negative implications creating disunity of human sciences, difficulty in the assessment of the situation in their field and disorientation in the elaboration of strategies for human studies. And we notice that if we have a universal paradigm of human constitution, this paradigm can be used as a principle and starting-point of the transformation of humanistic discourses directed to the epistemological integration of all the ensemble of these discourses.

Indeed, all such discourses deal eventually with the human being and human person who is their common root, “common denominator”. It means that phenomena described by any such discourse are of anthropological nature even though implicitly; and there is a certain sphere of anthropological reality and anthropological manifestations corresponding to these phenomena.

Taking this into account, we can choose an arbitrary humanistic discourse and develop a strategy or procedure that discloses its connection with the basic paradigm of human constitution (the paradigm of the anthropological unlocking) and carries out its reinterpretation in the prism of this connection.

This procedure has two principal stages: the first of them is the “anthropological decoding” of the discourse that should describe explicitly the set of anthropological manifestations corresponding to its subject sphere, while the second stage is the “anthropological localization” that should relate these manifestations to the Anthropological Border with its three basic kinds of human constitution.

Taken together, these stages perform the anthropologization of the chosen discourse providing it with a new conceptual base that goes back eventually to the paradigm of the anthropological unlocking. And if the procedure described is carried out for the most part of principal humanistic discourses one can say that this paradigm becomes the core or generating principle of a new episteme for the humanities. Anthropology based on this paradigm acquires a new function and status: now it plays the role that can be called the “science of human sciences”. In this role, it is not as much one of concrete disciplines with some particular subject sphere and phenomenal base as a meta-discourse serving as the melting-pot (to use the classical Humboldt metaphor) for all the  ensemble of the humanities[8] . This is the logical final of all the line of successive generalizations or extensions of the ancient Orthodox idea of synergy. It was a continuous line of the conceptual development that can be considered as the mainstream in history of synergy: one can hardly doubt that in all the field of modern thought, it is with anthropology that the original idea of theoanthropic collaboration is connected most closely and directly.