The project of synergic anthropology: spiritual practice as the basics for a new conception of man (part 3)
5 October 2018[Previous post: http://bit.ly/2DCnoRh]
3. The anthropological unlocking as the universal paradigm of man’s constitution
Our analysis of hesychast experience demonstrates its epistemological transparency. Now we come to the test of its anthropological full-bloodedness: is it possible to extend or generalize the principles found in hesychast anthropology to other domains of anthropological experience and eventually to the totality of the latter?
First of all, hesychast anthropology opens the way to general anthropology of spiritual practices (its basics are presented in my works[8]). The set of these ancient practices created by world religions is not big, but they are of considerable importance for understanding the phenomenon of man because they can be seen as schools of pure anthropological experience. The reconstruction of their anthropology is difficult since the majority of them belong to Eastern cultures whose spirituality and mentality use specific discourses alien to European conceptual thinking. Nevertheless advancing from the hesychast base, we can discern rather clearly their basic principles and structures. Each spiritual practice includes universal structural elements common to al the ensemble of such practices. Besides this common fund, there are, of course, great many structures and properties specific for a given practice; but it is important to note that the common fund includes the basic paradigm discovered by us in hesychasm, the paradigm of the constitution of man in the ontological unlocking (notwithstanding the fact that ontology as such is treated in Eastern systems in a radically different way). It means that, like hesychasm, all spiritual practices can be described and interpreted on the basis of nonclassical “anthropology of the unlocking”.
Now we turn to the experience of modern man. We said already that this experience makes one to reject classical anthropology; in other words, it is nonclassical experience. But we see now that this is the feature shared also by ancient spiritual practices! and hence it follows that the man described by classical anthropology is not the man as such, but only some particular anthropological formation. With all big merits of classical anthropology, this formation corresponds only to some restricted part of the totality of anthropological experience, the part situated between ancient nonclassical formations and new formations which are also nonclassical. We have shown above that the ancient, “preclassical” formations can be described on the basis of the paradigm of the anthropological unlocking. The logic of the advancement from the hesychast base leads to the working hypothesis: may be, this paradigm is present in modern postclassical anthropological formations as well? Is it possible that the constitution of the Postclassical Man is also formed up in the unlocking of this man, may be, the unlocking of some different kind now?
Anthropological practices dominating in the postclassical period confirm this hypothesis. On the one hand, these practices are very far from spiritual practices and from the goals of the ontological unlocking. But, on the other hand, rejecting ontological experience they do not leave behind extreme experience; on the contrary, they cultivate it intensely inventing new forms of it all the time. It means that anthropology of the Postclassical Man remains anthropology of the unlocking. It should describe the constitution of the man in practices of non-ontological unlocking.
The crisis of classical metaphysics and classical anthropology develops and intensifies in the last decades of the 19th c. It is exactly the period when the Western man begins to concentrate on a new kind of anthropological experience, the experience which was called later the experience of madness, in some enlarged and loose sense of the term. As a result of long and capital work combining empiric studies with theoretical intuitions and creation of new concepts Freud identified the nature of this experience on the basis of the concept of the unconscious which became one of principal concepts of the 20th c. playing the fundamental role both in psychology and anthropology. As happens often to discoverers, Freud attached absolute value to his discovery considering the unconscious as the only and all-embracing principle of the constitution of the consciousness and the man. However, in these global claims of Freud (and later Lacan) psychoanalysis begins to slip into ideology instead of science. For synergic anthropology, the experience of consciousness and behavior of man under the aegis of the unconscious represents a certain new kind of the experience of the unlocking: clearly, in order to act under the aegis of the unconscious the man should open or unlock himself towards its influence. The unconscious is not considered as belonging to some special mode of being different from the present being (being-there) which means that the unlocking towards the unconscious is not ontological but “ontical”, restricted completely to the horizon of the present being or the essent. At the same time, however, the unconscious is, by its definition, situated beyond the horizon of man’s consciousness which implies that the experience of the unlocking towards the unconscious if extreme experience. Finally, the patterns of consciousness and behavior induced by the unconscious form up the constitution of man (e.g. psychoanalysis identifies and studies neurotic, psychotic, manic and other types of human constitution generated by the unconscious). It means that the unconscious determines the paradigm of man’s constitution in the ontical unlocking.
Besides the constitution generated by the unconscious, the ontical unlocking and ontical constitution can have other representations. For example, according to Heidegger the Nietzschean principle of the will to power also determines some ontical constitution of the man, and hence it follows that in the area (or topic, in terms of synergic anthropology) of the ontical extreme experience there exist at least two different domains, the Freud domain and the Nietzsche domain. As for the Ontical topic as a whole, synergic anthropology describes its basic structure by means of the concept of the “ontical clearance” (onticheskii zazor, in Russian). In a certain sense, it is a polar opposition to the Heideggerian concept of the ontological lighting (die Lichtung). Ontical clearance is the “place”, the locus of the Ontical Other; it is the zone in the present being inaccessible for man’s experience and arising when the ontological difference (the difference between the being and the essent) is eliminated and hence the ontological lighting is eliminated too. The effect of the ontical clearance can be described in two ways: as the influence of some ontically outer source of energy which forms up man’s constitution or as the change, equally constitutive for the man, of topology of the space of anthropological manifestations. The description of the ontical extreme experience (the Ontical topic) based on the concept of the ontical clearance also follows the strategy of the advancement from the “rescued bit”, but in this case, in addition to the initial hesychast base, we use as the base for the advancement the experience of patterns of the unconscious conceptualized according to Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. It is worth to note that methodologically and epistemologically the topological way of describing ontical constitutions has some resemblance to topological anthropology by Deleuze and Guattari. (Similarly, as said above, in the Ontological topic our description of spiritual practices shares many methodological and epistemological features with the theory of practices of the Self by Foucault.)
