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.
3. The Domain of Synergetics
Evidently, in synergetics synergy is not conceived as an anthropological paradigm. It is a different domain on our Map of Synergy, and its contours are not clearly visible at first since synergy, as stressed above, has only implicit presence in synergetics. Thus we must try, first of all, to make these contours more precise. In explanations of Haken himself, he usually describes the subject sphere of synergetics by the most general formulas like “science of cooperation”, “theory of interaction”, “study of general laws in systems consisting of separate parts”, phenomena of “joint activity, joint energy in performing something” etc. etc. And indeed, this subject sphere contains extremely diverse phenomena and processes as well as extremely broad theories: one usually includes into the orbit of synergetics theory of dissipative structures, theory of self-organization, theory of deterministic chaos, theory of fractals, even theory of complexity, and so on. One can bet that there is no such interpretation of synergy (or another dynamical paradigm for that matter) that could serve as a common conceptual base for all this spectrum of very heterogeneous theories. It means that in order to analyze synergy in synergetics we must first single out of all the spectrum of “synergetic” theories and processes “synergic” ones, i.e. those, in which the presence of “something like synergy” can really be found. Guided by an intuitive idea of synergy that is suggested by the etymological meaning of the word, we shall include in the sphere of synergy in synergetics, in the first place, such theories that describe phenomena and processes, in which some coherence and collaboration of two different kinds or flows of energy coming from different sources takes place. The subclass of such “synergic theories” is also quite large, and it always was a kind of the core in all the variety of synergetic theories and conceptions. Of course, the conceptual and experiential framework for the intuitive idea of synergy present implicitly in synergetics is unavoidably the relation and interaction of inner and outer energy in open systems. A clear and simple description of this synergic or synergetic relation has been given by E.Laszlo: “Flow of outer energy going through an open non-equilibrium system in a state far from equilibrium induces the structuring of the system and its components and makes it possible for the system to receive, use and conserve growing and growing amounts of free energy. At the same time, the increase of complexity of the system takes place”[9] . This description can be considered as a brief exposition of the basic contents of synergy in synergetics. All the properties pointed out here can be found in the list of the ten “key principles characterizing the essence of synergetics” formulated by Haken in 1999 in the interview to Elena Nikolaevna Knyazeva (who luckily also takes part in this symposium). Cf., e.g.: “3. Among physical, chemical and biological systems it is open systems far from thermal equilibrium that are considered. … 6. Qualitative changes take place. 7. Emergent new qualities can be observed in such systems. 8. Functional structures of spatial, temporal or spatial-temporal nature emerge”[10] . Now it is clear enough which theories must be ranked among synergic ones. In the first place it is the theory of the laser radiation based on what is called the “laser paradigm” by Haken. The laser paradigm is the first example on which the existence of synergetics was discovered by him, and later he repeatedly used it to illustrate the principles of this science. Basically, it demonstrates, how “the pumping introduced into the atomic system from the outside… if the system is driven far from thermal equilibrium… produces a very pronounced coherence” of the laser radiation (Haken).
8
One should add, however, that on the practical level the separate construction of the melting-pot is needed for each humanistic discourse, and only in a few cases this anthropologizing remelting has been actually done so far. The most important case is the representation of historical process as the successive change of anthropological formations; versions of such anthropologization of history were presented in theory of practices of the Self by Michel Foucault as well as in synergetic anthropology.
9
E.Laszlo. The Age of Bifurcation. Understanding the Changing World // Put’ (Moscow). 1995, No 7. P.118. (The back-translation of the Russian translation of the original published in 1991.)
10
H.Haken. The interview to E.N.Knyazeva // Voprosy Filosofii. 1999. No 6. P.55. (In Russian.)