Philosophy in an Anthropological Perspective

Abstract

The paper analyzes the profound changes that are taking place in the foundations of philosophical and anthropological discourse, and interrelations of these discourses. The problems in question are considered basically in the prism of synergetic anthropology. The origins of the project of synergetic anthropology are described as well as stages of its development. The author displays philosophical and epistemological factors in virtue of which the initial stage of the project becomes ineluctably a comprehensive interdisciplinary reconstruction of the mystical and ascetic practices of hesychasm. At the following stage, the analysis is extended onto the so-called ‘spiritual practices’, a special class of practices of man’s self-transformation (‘practices of the Self’, in Foucault’s terminology) devoted to the cultivation of the fundamental ontological Man – God relation (or Man – Absolute Being, as in Far-Eastern practices). The paradigm of anthropological unlocking found in spiritual practices is generalized and presented as the universal paradigm of man’s constitution. Basing on this paradigm, an approach to the problem of subjectivity is developed, which makes it possible to describe the types of man’s constitution and reconstruct the set of structures of human personality and self-identity.