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 noumenaclass="underline" 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.
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The treatment of the concept of constitution based on its connection with the concept of unlocking is presented in my article: S.Horujy. The constitution of personality and identity in a perspective based on practices of the Self, old and new. // Voprosy Filosofii, 2007, no. 1, 75-85. (In Russian. The English version can be found on the website www.synergia-isa.ru).
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This repertory presents strikingly pluralistic view of the human being resembling to some extent postmodernist vision of human subjectivities in philosophy of Deleuze and Foucault.