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Synergetic Anthropology as a New Approach to the Method of Humanities
Sergey S. Horuzhy*
Institute of Synergetic Anthropology, 7a Vavilova str., Moskow 117321 Russia 1
Received 10.04.2008, received in revised form 06.05.2008, accepted 15.05.2008
The article presents the basic principles and methods of synergetic anthropology, a new school of thought that offers an alternative to classical European anthropology and which makes it possible to describe and analyze topical problems of the phenomenon of Man. Abandoning up the fundamental triad “essence - substance-subject ” leads one to search for new concepts and to the structural and methodological transformation of the anthropological discourse. The description of anthropological reality is developed not in terms of essence and its derivatives, but on the basis of energy or being-action. The uniqueness peculiarity of thith school becomes evident when it is compared to philosophical (essentialist) or post-structuralist anthropology. The discourse of history is considered as an example of the “anthropologizing transformation” a discourse from the humanities (leading to an “anthropolo-gized episteme”).
Keywords: phenomenon of Man, non-classical (synergetic) anthropology, principles of energetic and extreme nature, anthropological border, anthropological unlocking, topological philosophy, ontological topic, ontic topic, virtual topic, antropologized episteme.
Introduction
Synergetic anthropology is a school of thought which allows one to describe and analyze topical anthropological problems that classical European anthropology fails to properly describe and explain. Its topicality is determined by the fact that the classical interpretation of the phenomenon of Man proved itself to be untenable and out-of-date. Thus the task of philosophy is either to modify the existing anthropological conceptions or search for an alternative (non-classical) anthropology.
In this article we shall try to answer the following questions:
* Corresponding author E-mail address: [email protected]
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How fundamental must be the renewal of anthropological discourse?
Is it sufficient to find some new basic categories or is it the very structure of this discourse, its methodological and epistemological foundations which demand changes?
Isn’t it necessary in the light of the new anthropological situation to reconsider the status and nature of anthropology as such, its position within the system of humanities and its relations with the discourses of other disciplines?
Synergetic anthropology is an alternative to classical anthropology rather than its extension or modification. Its range of problems is not
restricted to practical applications (though some of these applications, e.g., problems of bioethics or terrorism, are most topical), but also includes general problems pertaining to the present-day situation in the humanities. Since this situation is basically that of heuristic confusion caused by the absence of a unifying paradigm, such problems are no less topical and important.
Now we will make synergetic anthropology an object of methodological reflection in order to display its theoretical foundations and its place in modern humanities. Since this article is intended for university audiences, it should be noted that in high schools, which provide educational foundations, a pedagogical and pragmatic approach to methodology is usually followed. In this approach, the methodology deals with producing teaching techniques and various practical advices and manuals. The subject of our discussion is not educational, but philosophical methodology, but both kinds are closely connected: the educational methodology should be based on a specific scientific method and its level is determined by qualities of the latter.
We have already noted that synergetic anthropology is based on a non-classical approach to the phenomenon of Man, while the classical European idea of Man is based on the fundamental triad “essence - substance - subject”. The concepts in this triad are not accepted in the description of man given by synergetic anthropology. Each of these three key concepts has already been criticized within the European philosophic tradition. The most radical rupture with the classical paradigm was eliminating the concept of essence which was the main principle not only of classical anthropology but also of all classical European philosophy after Aristotle. Essence was the last concept to have been abandoned, but its renunciation is now definite and unambiguous. It was substantiated, for example, in the works of
Jean-Luc Nancy, the greatest living authority in French philosophy.
As we shall see further, the renunciation of the fundamental triad implies not only the need for new basic concepts, but also the structural and methodological transformation of the anthropological discourse. The search for a new anthropology includes such large-scale tasks as revising of the status of anthropology and its position within the system of humanities.
Principles of synergetic anthropology
The first fundamental principle of synergetic anthropology is its energetic character or nature. This means that anthropological reality is described not in the discourse of essence but in the discourse of energy, or being-action. The problem of energy is one of the eternal, the most profound and complicated of philosophical questions, and many of its important aspects are still open. One of the main unfulfilled tasks is coming up with a satisfactory conception of “anthropological energies”: although the idea of “human energies” emerges naturally and inevitably and is intuitively rather concrete and clear, it is difficult to convert it into a proper philosophical concept. The classical notion of energy introduced by Aristotle and profoundly developed later by Neo-Platonists and some European thinkers, especially by Heidegger in his late period, cannot be applied here. That’s why we don’t make “human energies” our central notion. Instead, we use various correlating notions of the same nature, i.e., related to energy in some way. Such correlating notions include basic categories of many philosophical currents, for example, Schopenhauer’s philosophy of will, philosophy of life, existentialism, actionist approach in the late Marxism, etc.
We have chosen the term “anthropological manifestation” as basic. This notion has a wide field
of meanings and is of a more general character than all the above-mentioned energy-related categories. The actionist approach, for example, operates with such concepts as various kinds of activity, social and other practices, human actions etc. The discourse of manifestations includes all of them, but moreover it includes a very important category of “pre-actions” or “proto-actions”, that is, such manifestations which only started to take shape, which have the nature of “inner movements”, i.e. emotional impulses, intentions, strives etc. They all are included in the anthropological description according to the principle of energetic nature. The type and character of such description are closest to the anthropology of spiritual practices.
The second (and the last) fundamental principle of synergetic anthropology is that of its extreme character or nature. It can be formulated as follows: in all the vast and heterogeneous ensemble of anthropological manifestations, we single out the class of so-called extreme human manifestations and accept that this class plays a key role in the constitution of a human being, the basic structures of its personality and identity. Extreme manifestations are those in which human experience reaches the borders of its horizon. It means that in such manifestations a human being achieves a contact with the reality beyond the horizon of his experience and existence; in short, he achieves a contact with the Other to himself.
An example provides an illustration from the field of spiritual practices, which served as an experiential pool for our approach, in all well-developed world traditions, spiritual practices at their higher stages produce such phenomena, in which some cardinal transformations of the human organization begin. First of all, it is human perceptions that experience such transformations: a completely different perceptive system is formed up. Surely, these are very unusual phenomena, but nevertheless they have been registered and described repeatedly in all spiritual traditions.
In Christianity and hesychasm the perceptive systems that coalesce in spiritual practice are called “noetic feelings”. This is a typical example of extreme human manifestations.
Key concepts of synergetic anthropology
The set of all extreme human manifestations taken together is called the Anthropological Border. This notion is closely connected with another one. We have already noticed that in his extreme manifestations, a man comes into contact with the Other to himself, i.e. certain reality beyond the horizon of his consciousness and existence. It means that he becomes open towards the Other, so that an anthropological opening or unlocking of a human being takes place. It can proceed in different ways, each of which corresponds to a certain type or mechanism of man’s constitution. The notion of anthropological unlocking provides the most profound philosophical characterization of anthropological reality in terms of openness-closeness, and so it becomes the central concept of new anthropology. While in classical tradition at the human being was represented as an entity possessing a certain unchangeable essence, in an alternative view, it can be represented as an entity opening itself in a certain way. The idea of anthropological unlocking emerged first in Byzantine theology as a conception of synergy, which means a collaboration, coordination, coherence of divine and human energies. The name “synergetic anthropology” refers to this theological paradigm, and it is now obvious that this anthropological approach can also be called the “anthropology of unlocking”, the synergy being the first historical example of such unlocking, discovered and described by hesychast ascesis and Byzantine theology. Within the philosophical tradition, the paradigm of anthropological unlocking appears most evidently in the work of Kierkegaard. Here this paradigm
stands out as the key generating principle of all his body of thought; according to Kierkegaard, “everyone’s duty is to make oneself open” for the meeting with God.
The Anthropological Border consists of several domains: the extreme human manifestations forming it can be of different natures; in other words, there are different mechanisms of anthropological unlocking. It turns out, however, that there are only three such mechanisms.
In spiritual practices, a man accomplishes his self-actualization ontologically, representing himself as a certain mode of being (namely, a mode characterized by finiteness and mortality) and constituting himself in his relation to another kind of being, to the (ontological) Other, by means of unlocking himself to energies of the latter. This is an ontological unlocking, and the extreme human manifestations in which it is realized form a certain part of the Anthropological Border called the Ontological Topic (from the Greek topos, place). At the same time, it is now well-known that man’s constitution can also be formed under the influence of the energies of the unconscious. In this case a man is open or unlocked towards the unconscious, and this kind of unlocking is not ontological, since the unconscious is not interpreted as a special mode of being: it is the Other with respect to the horizon of human consciousness, or the ontical Other. Thus it is the ontical unlocking that takes place here; and the extreme human manifestations corresponding to it form another part of the Anthropological Border, called the Ontical Topic.
The properties of these two topics differ considerably: man’s unlocking in the meeting with the unconscious has no ontological dimension, but instead it involves rich topological effects. Acting within human organization, the unconscious works as a topological factor, creating manifold topological effects in the space of consciousness (and hence in man’s behavior). According
to psychoanalysis, under the influence of the unconscious the structures of man’s mind and behavior begin to reproduce certain trajectories or figures - the “patterns of the unconscious”. The character of these patterns implies that the topology of the world of consciousness becomes curved or multi-connected. The most typical patterns are breakings of connectedness, which make some parts of consciousness disconnected from and inaccessible to each other. Using physical metaphors, one can say that the unconscious works as a sui generis magnetic anomaly, or else as a source of the “curvature of space”. The philosophical interpretation of anthropological reality determined by the unconscious was developed by French philosophy as early as the 2030s of the last century; but in the last decades, in the post-structuralist thought of Foucault, Deleuze etc., it took the form of “topological philosophy”. In general, we find this interpretation adequate, with an important reservation, however: as synergetic anthropology shows, the “Topological Man”, determined by his interaction with the unconscious, is not the only representation of the phenomenon of Man; this phenomenon possesses two more basic representations as well as their combinations, or “hybrids”.
Finally, the last way of man’s unlocking is realized in virtual practices, which are currently spreading more and more widely. The difference between virtual and actual phenomena consists in the lack of some constitutive characteristics, due to the fact that virtual phenomena are not completely actualized, or “embodied”. Because of this, they should also be considered as extreme human manifestations, and these manifestations form another part of the Anthropological Border called the Virtual Topic. The three topics can also make combinations or superpositions, which we call the hybrid topics.
According to the description of the Anthropological Border, a human being is
represented as a pluralistic being who realizes himself in the three main exemplifications - as Ontological Man, Ontical (or Topological) Man, and Virtual Man. Thus Man is a community of his exemplifications. Members of this community are connected with manifold ties, interactions, mutual transitions and transformations. Studying all these ties is a special vast field of problems. Each of the three basic representations of the human being has its own kind of anthropology, very different from other ones. They were all familiar to philosophical and anthropological thought (though Virtual Man is still very little studied), but only separately, and there was no idea that all these representations coexist in humans and that anthropology should be an integral discipline including all the three parts with all their connections. Instead, there was a conflict between Ontological and Ontical anthropologies as two approaches to the phenomenon of Man, each excluding the other. Psychoanalytic anthropology has, from the moment of its birth, denied religious anthropology. The dogmatic adherents of the religious worldview, in their turn, often denied the psychoanalytical approach completely and categorically. But we have now obtained a standpoint which makes it possible to deconstruct this binary opposition. We see that man is a pluralistic being who can realize himself as the Topological Man, governed by the unconscious, but who can also realize himself in a different way, not governed by the unconscious at all. A human being has different constitutions corresponding to different kinds of anthropology, and all these kinds should be taken into account.
Synergetic anthropology as a scientific and philosophical method We begin our methodological reflection on the described anthropological approach by analysing of its relation to philosophical
anthropology. Evidently, this approach is based on philosophical notions. Doesn’t it automatically mean that it is just another trend within the realm of philosophical anthropology? The answer is no. The approach presented is not a branch of philosophical anthropology, and there are many reasons for this.
The first obvious thing: synergetic
anthropology does not belong to philosophical anthropology,ifthe latter isconceived as essentialist philosophy, the task of which is the analysis of the essence of man and the essentialist structures of man’s being. Such a conception of philosophical anthropology was inherent in classical metaphysics and remained widely used, even in the period of its crisis. In particular, it was firmly supported by Max Scheler, whose anthropological views are most influential; according to the Scheler’s definition, “philosophical anthropology is a fundamental science dealing with man’s essence and man’s essential structure”1. All the discourse of synergetic anthropology, which excludes the concept of the essence of man, diverges from this conception. The same must be said about all poststructuralist anthropology, the most significant school of modern anthropological thought. But even if philosophical anthropology is conceived more widely, in some way not including strict essentialism in the spirit of Scheler, synergetic anthropology will still not belong to it. It is not only philosophical discourse that necessarily takes part in the constitution of synergetic anthropology. In constructing the Ontological topic, which describes the human being unlocking himself towards the ontological Other, or God, we draw upon the experience of spiritual practices, presented in the ascetic and theological discourse. Similarly, in constructing the Ontic topic, we draw necessarily upon the discourse of psychoanalysis. To efficiently study the details and mechanisms
M.Scheler. Man and history// Max Scheler. Selected works. M., 1994. P. 70.
of extreme human manifestations, we must use elements of system theory and synergetical parallels. The list of such goings-out into various neighboring discourses can be continued; and the conclusion is that synergetic anthropology is not a philosophical trend, and that, in particular, it does not belong to the field of philosophical anthropology.
It cannot also be considered as an “interdisciplinary” or “cross-disciplinary” approach of the type popular in natural sciences, when one combines notions, methods and tools of two or more scientific disciplines in order to describe some new field of study. The field of study in synergetic anthropology, the human being, is not new, but entirely traditional, and it is not a combination, but the transformation of elements of various discourses that is carried out here. Synergetic anthropology conceptualizes and constitutes its working field not by borrowing methods from existing disciplinary discourses, but by starting ab ovo and using its own original generating principle. Generally speaking, synergetic anthropology involves all discourses dealing with the human being, or “man-commensurable” (chelovekomernye) discourses, in the convenient terminology proposed by V.S.Stepin and V.I.Arshinov. But its relationship with these discourses corresponds not to the interdisciplinary, but the trans-disciplinary paradigm, which means that it processes all the elements taken from other discourses, transforming them into a new conceptual and methodological unity. In other words, it possesses its own “melting pot”, according to the old metaphor by Humboldt.
Looking into this “melting pot”, we clearly see the methodological and epistemological dimensions of synergetic anthropology. The contents of all the discourses in the “melting pot” are transformed in such a way that they all become integrated into the topical representation of a human being with its explicitly anthropological
language. They don’t keep their original form: initially they were just “man-commensurable”, i.e. connected with anthropological reality only in some indirect way; but now they acquire an explicit anthropological character. And this means that some real process of conversion or “re-melting” takes place here. In other words, synergetic anthropology is (at least, potentially) a kind of general method converting all discourses dealing, however indirectly, with anthropological reality into a new form, in which their anthropological content is explicitly displayed. There is a parallel here to Husserlian phenomenology which, according to Husserl, can be conceived not as a particular philosophical trend, but as a general method for all the humanities. Certainly, in our case such an interpretation is as yet no more than a possibility or a project. The main point of this project can be best conveyed through the idea of episteme. Here an “anthropologized” episteme should emerge, which successively fulfills the anthropologization of all the sphere of the humanities. Anthropology, which is the core of this episteme, plays the role of a meta-discourse or, using the formula of I.P.Smirnov, “science of all sciences on man”.
Though such a scheme, presenting synergetic anthropology as the generative core of a new episteme, is only a project so far, it is not an utopia. The project is realizable, and its realization is already in progress. A universal procedure is worked up for the “anthropological re-melting”, i.e. for the transformation of any discourse pertaining to the humanities. This procedure is called “anthropological localization”, and its aim is to establish and present in an explicit form the connection between the phenomenal sphere corresponding to the chosen discourse and the topics of the Anthropological Border. This procedure includes several stages. The first can
be characterized as sui generis “anthropological decoding”, or the translation of the discourse in
question into the language of anthropological manifestations. To start with, we determine the sphere of the phenomena represented by the discourse in question and decide which anthropological manifestations correspond to these phenomena. As a result, we obtain the characterization of this phenomenal sphere in explicitlyanthropologicalterms. For each discourse of the humanities this is possible a priori, since all these discourses are “man-commensurable”. For example, the phenomena of consciousness in psychology are at the same time anthropological manifestations so that no decoding is needed for them. Historical phenomena deal with people’s actions, and for each concrete phenomenon we can find out what kind of anthropological manifestations it corresponds to.
The following stage is the main one. Having singled out a certain phenomenal sphere and the class of corresponding anthropological manifestations, we should establish and explicitly describe the connection between these manifestations and the extreme human manifestations, i.e. the Anthropological Border. We know that such a connection does exist: arbitrary human manifestations depend on the extreme ones and are determined by them; because the latter are constitutive elements of anthropological description, they determine the structures of man’s personality and identity. The problem is to describe the concrete and explicit form of this connection.
There is no universal solution to this problem. All the solutions are valid only for a particular phenomenal sphere, for some phenomena depend on man’s relations with the ontological Other and are characterized by religious manifestations, some depend on patterns of the unconscious, and others, on virtual practices. There can be no general formula describing the dependence of the “usual” anthropological manifestations on the extreme ones. However, synergetic anthropology
introduced some general concepts and elaborated some ways and means that help to describe typical relations in the set of human manifestations and make explicit the dependence of the latter of the extreme manifestations. Anthropological manifestations are grouped into anthropological practices and strategies, and there are typical relations between such practices: those of reciprocal influence, implication, coordination or incompatibility etc. The main types of such relations are characterized by special concepts. The most important of these is the concept of anthropological practice, which is an adhering practice with respect to a certain guiding practice. The adhering practice is oriented towards the guiding one and adopts, but only partially, its goals and values, elements of organization and structure, etc. For instance, in the anthropological and social practices of medieval society, the guiding role belonged to the ontological relation between Man and God. It means that anthropological and social practices mostly adhered to the principal guiding practice or body of practices dealing with the cultivation of this fundamental the anthropic relation. It is evident that this concept and similar ones contribute efficiently to solving our problem. The extreme human manifestations are grouped into extreme practices, and due to the special status of these manifestations, a great many anthropological and social practices adhere to the extreme ones. To put it differently, the extreme practices are surrounded by a vast medium or “adhering layer” of adhering practices. Since such practices are numerous and wide-spread, we can first establish the connection of the chosen class of anthropological manifestations with some tipe of them and then proceed from these adhering practices to their guiding practices, which belong to the Anthropological Border.
When the connection with the Anthropological Border is established, we have
both the “anthropological decoding” of the
discourse concerned and also its “anthropological localization”, i.e. its connection with a certain topic of the Anthropological Border. The main purpose is achieved: the chosen discourse is included in the sphere of synergetic anthropology and is ready for the “anthropological re-melting”. As a result, the phenomena studied within this discourse are represented as the deeds or products of the main exemplifications of the human being - Ontological, Topological and Virtual Man; and the discourse itself takes an anthropologized form. If a certain considerable number of disciplines has been processed in such a way, one can say that the humanities have been transformed into a new episteme, which is an anthropologized episteme based on synergetic anthropology.
We should note one important quality of this new episteme: it clearly reflects the generative role of a man in the humanities which is ignored in the classical paradigm. There is a fundamental epistemological fact: for any discourse of the humanities a man is not only an object of study but also the subject, who creates this discourse. Thus the epistemological situation is cyclic, it represents a hermeneutical circle: the object of the discourse is a creative instance, a man who has, in his turn, this very discourse as his object. All the discourses taking part in the description of anthropological reality are essentially the epiphenomena of this reality; and this specific epistemological and hermeneutical situation must be taken into account in the episteme, into which these discourses are organized. This condition was not met in the classical episteme, but it is met in the episteme now emerging on the basis of synergetic anthropology.
“Anthropological re-melting”
of some discourses pertaining to the humanities
For some discourses the “anthropological re-melting” has already began. In the first place,
let us mention history. We should remember that considerable experience of the anthropologizing transformation of historical discourse already exists in the historical, or rather the historico-anthropological studies of Michel Foucault. All his famous histories such as “the history of madness”, “the history of punishment”, “the history of sexuality” are thoroughly anthropologized histories; history is represented in them as a history of Man, or the process of the evolution of anthropological practices, anthropological predicates and other elements of Man’s existence. Such an approach suggested the next stage: to move from tracing the evolution of these elements to the evolution of the phenomenon of Man as a whole. In this stage one should single out basic anthropological formations, which interact with and replace each other in historical time. Such advancement was made, though very briefly, by Deleuze. In his interpretation, Foucault’s anthropologized history corresponds to the following series of anthropological formations: Form-God, Form-Man, Form-Superman (the last one is only emerging now).
The principles that synergetic anthropology follows in its approach to history are practically the same. To start with, we see that this anthropology has a historical dimension: in each moment of history, of all possible anthropological formations (in our case, topics of the Anthropological Border) that create the phenomenon of Man, not all are realized and not to the same extent. At each concrete moment, some formation takes the dominant position, so that the historical process can be considered as a process of the change of the dominant anthropological formations. This key principle is the same as that in the approach followed by the French philosophers, but the formations singled out in synergetic anthropology are absolutely different, and hence anthropologized history looks quite different as well.
In our case there are only three basic formations: Ontological - Topological - Virtual Man. But it is easy to see that in the real history, the dominant anthropological formation may not coincide with any of these formations: this history is richer and more complicated than our scheme. Of course, in the early ages, the dominant anthropological relation is that of Man and God, so that the Ontological Man should be the dominant formation. But looking more closely, we see that it took a long time for Man to develop the paradigm of unlocking himself towards the ontological Other, i.e. to actualize himself as the Ontological Man. As can be seen clearly in the example of shamanism, archaic forms of religiosity do not correspond to the Ontological Topic. Archaic Man has not yet distinguished and separated those of his manifestations in which he actualizes his relation to the other mode of being (ontological relation) and to the unconscious (the ontical relation). Here the religious sphere and that of the unconscious are both involved actively and joined indivisibly. Thus extreme human manifestations are here of mixed character; they form up an anthropological formation, which can be called “Pre-Ontological Man”, one who is ontological and ontical at the same time. It is only in the next stage that a man, through intense work in religious consciousness, begins to structure and separate his manifestations and actualizes himself as the Ontological Man.
In the following period the dominant position is again taken by a formation that does not belong to the three basic ones. In the course of secularization, starting from the Renaissance, man rejects the ontological unlocking as a principle of his constitution. The relation to the ontological Other is no longer anymore in its dominant anthropological role, and it is shifted away and gradually forced out. As for the unconscious, it has not yet been identified as an object for the consciousness, and the relation to it is not yet considered. The result is that Man has lost any
connection to his Border, he can no longer see or locate it anywhere. Thus it is only natural that in this period he is captivated by the idea of the Infinite: he adopts the conception of the infinite universe and tries to constitute himself as a Cartesian cognizing subject who constitutes himself in his relation to the infinite and borderless universe, and thus is infinite and borderless himself. This peculiar intermediate formation of “Borderless Man” is based on the cult of human reason: this reason realizes man’s relation to the infinite universe, and in order to develop and practice this relation adequately, it must be infinite itself and omnipotent, at least potentially.
Ontological Man did not ignore the unconscious, he had known about it, though not in a scientific way, as an opposing anthropological factor and he developed ways to suppress its influence. The “Borderless Man” rejected these ways and all the economy of the relationship between Man and Other Being; all his principal strategies were based on denying of the very existence of the unconscious and its effects. So these effects flourished, gaining more and more place in the anthropological reality. Considering that the sphere of the unconscious as a principle opposite to consciousness and reason is often called (for example, by Lacan) “the sphere of madness”, we can describe this situation with a simple aphorism: “The cult of reason leads to the realm of madness'”. By the end of the 19th century (though chronological limits here can only be very approximate), the Ontical Man whose constitution is determined by the unconscious was gaining the dominant anthropological position. Vivid examples of his dominating role are given by the culture of modernism.
Anthropological dynamics are currently accelerating, and the next change of the dominant formations has already taken shape. On the verge of the millennium, virtual practices are spreading more and more widely and advancing to the
dominant position. However, the progressive exodus of Man into virtual reality is fraught with serious anthropological dangers and risks. Preliminary study on the basis of synergetic anthropology shows that it is possible for man to overcome the danger of increasing virtualization. If he cannot achieve such a victory, the unbounded virtualization of anthropological reality can lead to the euthanasia of humanity.
Such are the principal current results of anthropologization in the field of history. Some studies have also been made in the anthropologization of the aesthetic sphere. We analyzed mostly the last period and present-day practices, since very topical anthropological problems are involved here. A profound, fundamental crisis is taking place in the sphere of fine arts, which demands a thorough revision of all the basic concepts of this sphere, such as the creative aesthetic act and aesthetic object. In the process of this revision, modern artists must inevitably turn to anthropology. The modern artist’s consciousness is extremely sensitive to anthropological problems and he sees himself compelled to anthropological reflection. In such a situation, fruitful contact is possible between the artistic community and philosophers working in the field of anthropology. For example, on the initiative of artists-participants of the large project “Credo” presented at the Second Moscow Biennale of 2007, a series of discussions concerning synergetic anthropology was held.
Evidently, ourprogram of anthropologization, when applied to philosophy, creates special problems. We shall not touch upon them now, but notice only that anthropologizing trends have already been visibly present in a number of modern philosophical conceptions. The most important of them is the classical Heidegger philosophy in “Being and Time”. All these conceptions have one trait in common: they try to distance themselves from philosophical anthropology as such, following the general idea that it is not anthropology that should be philosophical, but philosophy that should be anthropological. This attitude was clearly expressed by Heidegger, who said in his well-knownpolemic with Cassirer during their meeting in Davos in 1929, “All the topos of problems of “Being and Time”, dealing with man’s existence, is not philosophical anthropology. The latter is too narrow and preliminary for it”. As for synergetic anthropology, in its anthropologization of philosophical discourse by means of a “melting pot”, new and interesting parallels with the phenomenological paradigm appear.
To summarize, we can now say that we already have many examples from different fields of knowledge showing that the program of the anthropologization of the humanities on the basis of synergetic anthropology is sufficiently realizable and promising.
References
5.5. Horuzhy, To the Phenomenology of Ascesis (Moscow, 1998), in Russian.
5.5. Horuzhy, Philosophy and Ascesis (New York, 1999), in Russian.
5.5. Horuzhy, About Old and New (St. Petersburg, 2000), in Russian.
5.5. Horuzhy, The Essays in Synergetic Anthropology (Moscow, 2005), in Russian.
