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Synergia as a universal paradigm: its meaning(s), discursive links and heuristic resources

“It would not be reasonable to reject out of hand the idea that the world religions… still bear a semantic potential that unleashes an inspiring energy for all of society”.

Jürgen Habermas .

0. Mapping the territory: that is the question

In minds of intellectual community of the present day the notion of synergy is first of all associated with synergetics. The program of our workshop is also in full accordance with this fact: it shows that almost all the presented talks are devoted to synergetics in its numerous aspects and branches. The situation makes it natural to expect that the information on what is synergy can be found in synergetics in the first place. But here comes the first paradox of my theme: if I ask the question: What is synergy? – I shall not be able to find the answer in synergetics. The notion of synergy is neither used nor even introduced in synergetics. It is well-known that the connection synergy – synergetics is in no way accidental: as Hermann Haken explained repeatedly, this connection has been put by him from the very start into the idea and the name of a new discipline invented by him. But Haken makes it clear at the same time that the Greek word συνεργεια has served for him only in its literal, etymological meaning: as a source of intuitive ideas about cooperation, collective phenomena, concerted action and interaction, etc. – so that the new discipline could be conceived as “science of cooperation”. The word has helped to form up the name for synergetics, and after this it was not needed anymore; the new science did not make it one of its terms or concepts. On the other hand, however, the fact remained that processes and phenomena studied in synergetics have the properties characterized by synergia even if the word is not conceptualized and is understood only in the initial intuitive sense. It means that synergia is in fact present in synergetics, but only implicitly. Hence the problem arises to display its presence explicitly or, in other words, to reconstruct the concept or paradigm of synergia hidden in synergetics. At the same time, synergia had always another life as well, not hidden, but quite open, that has begun many centuries before the invention of synergetics and went on ever after till nowadays with some interruptions. This other life develops in a completely different sphere, less known and popular than synergetics, the sphere of Eastern-Christian thought. Its history here is rich, and its role quite important: synergia is one of the key concepts of Eastern-Christian spirituality and worldview.

This concept appears in Greek patristics and early Christian ascetics and has a specific nature combining theological and practical, i.e. experiential and anthropological, dimensions. In late Byzantium it becomes one of the cornerstones of a sophisticated theological and philosophical teaching based on ascetical experience and discourse of energy instead of the Aristotelian essentialist discourse of the Western thought. After the fall of Byzantium this teaching was almost  th th forgotten, but it makes gradually its return in the 18-19th cc., and since the mid-20 th c. it is carefully reconstructed on the modern theological and philosophical level and developed further.